Introducing up–down asymmetry into the tokamak magnetic equilibria appears to be a feasible method to drive fast intrinsic toroidal rotation in future large devices. In this paper we investigate how the intrinsic momentum transport generated by up–down asymmetric shaping scales with the mode number of the shaping effects. Making use the gyrokinetic tilting symmetry (Ball et al 2016 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion58 045023), we study the effect of envelopes created by the beating of different high-order shaping effects. This reveals that the presence of an envelope can change the scaling of the momentum flux from exponentially small in the limit of large shaping mode number to just polynomially small. This enhancement of the momentum transport requires the envelope to be both up–down asymmetric and have a spatial scale on the order of the minor radius.