SHOALS

Overview

SHOALS recreates the soul of the Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water — a “K-field modulator” — and extends it into a modern stereo plugin. Where a normal chorus or vibrato rides a periodic LFO, Shoals modulates a short bucket-brigade delay with a pseudo-random generator — random voltage steps at random intervals — so the pitch wanders and warbles unpredictably and never repeats: uncertain, subtle, nostalgic. The wet signal passes through an envelope-driven low-pass gate, so the effect breathes with your dynamics; blend in dry signal and the pure vibrato becomes shimmering, seasick chorus.

A powered-down unit in Collection IV — The Rack Archive.

Features

• Non-cyclical modulation — A pseudo-random generator (random steps, random intervals) drives a short BBD delay line, so the pitch drift never repeats.
• Envelope low-pass gate — A voltage-controlled filter driven by an envelope follower darkens quiet passages and opens up on louder ones, revealing the lo-fi grit.
• BBD character — Dark, swampy recovery filtering, gentle aliasing and a defeatable bucket-brigade noise floor, with optional companding as a modeling choice.
• Modern superpowers — Independent stereo modulation for lush width, tempo-synced random-change rates, and Freeze / Re-seed control over the random state.