Stompboxes such as Catalinbread's Heliotrope and Malekko Heavy Industry's Scrutator can inflict digital distortion
on analog signal chains.
Image 1
Two of the big knobs control bit crushing and downsampling (labeled “dwsp"). The leftmost knob sets the drive level feeding the effect. Higher drive settings are wilder and noisier.
To the right of the big knobs are simple low-pass and high-pass tone controls that siphon off highs and/or lows downstream from the digital distortion. The res control adds resonant feedback at the filter cutoff frequencies. At the far right are wet/dry faders. (All examples heard here are 100 percent wet.) The bottom row is the modulation section, with an LFO that can sync to a track's metronome. There are four modulating waveforms to choose from. The remaining knobs specify which parameters are subject to modulation. Impressive for a free plug-in, huh?
You can combine bitcrushing and downsampling, as heard in Clip 3. (The settings are those shown in Image 1.) Obviously, bitcrushed sounds can be so degraded that they have no definite pitch. That's not a bad thing, necessarily—you can say the same about many cymbal and drum sounds. But as you downsample, there's a strong resonance at the filter cutoff point, which you can use to roughly tune the effect.
You might not identify the primary pitch in Ex. 4 as D. But when the Dm bass-synth riff enters after four bars, they kinda/sorta cooperate harmonically.
Image 2
The heavy downsampling in Ex. 4 yields a more bass-like tone. Image 2 shows the settings.
Image 3
Now let's try incorporating Krush's modulation section, as seen in Image 3. With the lowpass filter resonance set high and fast 64th note triple modulation routed to both the filter frequency and the downsampling amount, you get the splish-splash water effect of Clip 5.
Naturally, once you capture such sounds within your DAW, you can stir up additional trouble. In Clip 6, for instance, I doubled the guitar recording, processed each clip with its own Krush setting, and panned the two tracks in stereo. Note how the glitching adds rhythmic tension as it clashes against the quantized electronic beats. It's similar to the way rhythmically imperfect loops can add tension and character to hip-hop tracks.
Bring the noise. Here we've looked at downsampling within your DAW. But you can create similar effects without a computer thanks to recent bitcrushing stompboxes such as Catalinbread's Heliotrope and Malekko Heavy Industries' Scrutator, which convert your analog signal to lo-res digital.
Obviously, these flavors aren't for everybody. But before you shriek “never!" I urge you to explore these sounds in musical contexts. Bitcrushed audio can be brutal on its own, but you may be surprised by how often this abrasive effect can lend texture and interest to a mix, especially alongside less extreme sounds.
