This paper takes the opportunity of presenting a set of new adaptive effects to propose a generic scheme for adaptive effects built upon a spectral source-filter decomposition and a Short-Time Fourier analysis-resynthesis. This allows for a better formalization of the involved signal processing algorithms and leads to a simple classification of adaptive effects already presented in the literature, that falls into this category. We discuss the motivation and the advantages of combining source-filter modeling and phase vocoder representation for the design of adaptive digital audio effects. Then we detail the general structure that includes STFT analysis and re-synthesis scheme, the source filter decomposition, and an adaptive control unit composed of a feature extraction system and a sound mapping unit that might be driven by a gestural control section.