EL CLAPO

Gatey Watey has one feature that we believe every gate should have; frequency selective attenuation. What this means, is that you can tell Gatey Watey to only attenuate the high frequencies (or the low frequencies, if you’re into that sort of thing) when the input drops below the threshold.

This turns out to be super powerful when it comes to gating drums, electric guitars, or pretty much anything that requires a gate. For example, if you want to cut the high hat bleed out of a snare without killing the ring of the snare, Gatey Watey is your man. Do you want your distorted guitars to ring out without your neighbor’s fluorescent light collection blaring through your pickups? Gatey Watey to the rescue. Even in normal gating situations, Gatey Watey excels. You just tell it what to turn down, and how much to turn it down.

El Clapo Unique Features

• Easily generate ultra-realistic handclaps, from an intimate-sounding single clap to an out-of-control mob of 150
• Great for music and film post-production
• Three adjustable mic positions; close/mid and room
• Close and Room mic controls each feature a fully adjustable compressor with mix knob, 4-band EQ, and width control
• “Slop” control lets you adjust how tight or lose the claps
• Simple, straightforward interface with access to advanced controls including velocity-sensing MIDI curve control, panning, timing, layer, and CPU-saving round-robin settings
• Built-in step sequencer with 12 editable patterns and adjustable speed

Cracking the Code

To create the plugin, we put a tremendous amount of thought into the process of recording and the way crowds time their handclaps. It came clear that having three microphones (close, mid, and room) was critical in terms of creating the difference between an intimate handclap track and a huge crowd.

The plugin also takes into account the various types of processing that music or film-post-mixer would use to make tracks fit in the context. The end result is natural-sounding handclaps regardless of the size of the crowd, plus the ability to custom-tailor those tracks to suit the creative needs of any genre of program material you put El Clapo to work in.

Sound Engine

The ability to play 150 samples with multiple mic positions ran the risk of making a massive hit to CPU resources. To solve that problem, El Clapo does some work in the background. As the crowd size gets larger, rather than just playing back a large number of samples, El Clapo builds a new set of samples, which can be played back with low CPU usage.