That does not stretch time. But that’s how it started. Paul Weber, in the FB ZOIA group asked about real-time time stretching and I… am not sure that’s really a thing. But I got to thinking about how I had stretched time for Deep Time (https://patchstorage.com/deep-time-a-time-stretching-loop-patch/). That patch uses a granular module and a looper to offset one another’s time dilation, so that changes in speed do not result in changes in pitch. Now, I couldn’t use a looper for a real-time application, but I thought maybe I could achieve something close if I used a pitch shifter.

Okay, origin story out of the way. Because my theory was… sort of right, kind of. Running the granular module into the pitch shifter produced… something like real-time stretching. Sort of. I guess. But it sounded just terrible. And I was thinking, well, I’ll realize that patch as a curiosity anyhow, but I considered: “What if I reverse the order, placing the pitch shifter before the granular module?” And this patch was born.

While it doesn’t stretch time it… produces all manner of strange and (in my opinion) quite lovely sounds. With a very minor change to the “Timestretch” control, there are wonderful, subtle choruses and flanges (adjust the feedback control). As time is “stretched” more in the negative direction, those shift into a glassy, modulated reverb, before finally becoming a strange rhythmic pad/delay sound. Pushing time forward, in a very small amount, produces more modulation, before things quickly descend into bit crushing and aliasing (which has its own strange beauty).

So, that’s Relative Time.

It is stereo throughout.

Controls:

Mix — wet/dry mix

Timestretch — I never renamed this control, and once I realized it didn’t really apply, I wasn’t sure what to call it. Read the paragraph above for some of the effects it produces at different settings.

Feedback — allows the circuit to be fed back into itself; with chorus tones, produces a more flanged quality, with reverb sounds, a longer decay, with other, stranger sounds… well, try it out!

High/low dampening — filters; high dampening is in the feedback loop, low damping is at the end of the chain, they are subtle, but can be quite useful for shaping sound (they may click as you adjust them; these use multi-filters, which I prefer for tone-shaping, but they also may cause the CPU to clip momentarily as adjusted)

Sorry about the clipping in the video. My bad.