Secco

Shorten each hit, shape its brightness, and swing audio in real time.

The transient shortening in Ableton's Beats mode (if you know, you know) is one of those tiny quirks that turns out to be accidentally one of the best features in any DAW. I've loved it for years. It's the one thing that kept pulling me back to Ableton every time I tried to move to other DAWs, tail between my legs, because I wanted my loops tight and nothing else did it like Ableton could. So I built a plugin that does that job, then put it on steroids.

Secco is a transient envelope shaper for drums, percussion and loops. Every hit gets two envelopes of its own: an amplitude envelope that shortens it, and a separate filter envelope that shapes how its brightness decays. Tighten a kick. Pull the air off a hat. Leave the body alone. Most of the time that's the whole job for me: one drum loop, nice and tight, muted and plucky.

Four trigger sources decide what gets shaped: transient detection, a host-synced musical grid, an audio sidechain, or MIDI notes. From there the fun knobs take over. Chance mutes some hits and lets others through, so a stiff loop starts breathing. Spread throws each surviving hit to its own spot in the stereo field. Expression drives the envelopes from MIDI velocity or a sidechain, so you can play the shaper like an instrument.

There's no sequencer in here and no preset browser to scroll. It's a tool for hits: envelopes, filter, swing, chance.

Features

• Independent amplitude and filter envelopes per hit, each with length, hold and soften up to 30 ms
• 12 or 24 dB/oct low-pass with resonance up to Q=4, plus a Low Cut
• Four trigger sources: transient detection (5-250 ms minimum gap), a host-synced musical grid, audio sidechain, MIDI
• Real-time swing
• Chance: 0-100% per hit, from every hit to none, decided after the filter so muted hits keep their tone
• Spread: random pan per surviving hit, up to full width, mono-safe
• Expression: MIDI velocity or sidechain drives Volume, Amplitude, Filter and Resonance, -100 to +100% per control
• Link amplitude and filter envelope lengths with one click; the ratio survives your edits
• Host-synced input and output waveform, so you see each hit before and after
• Light and dark interface, follows your system