Glitch This...

So I grabbed myself a demo of dblue’s Glitch VST last night, in searching for drum-destroying plugins. It’s been a long time since I was surprised by a plugin that doesn’t model/imitate analog gear, I have to say. This plug is fucking awesome. What you’ve got is a timeline of N steps (max 64) of N units of time (the usual suspects), and each step can either have no effect, a specific choice of one of the 8 included effects, or a random choice of same. Each effect has a multi-mode filter, as well, and there’s also an overall filter and overdrive.

The 8 different effects are well-suited to killing your audio. I don’t care for the flanger (because I don’t like flanging in general) and some of the controls are a bit obtuse, but you can solo each effect to get the settings right, and it is pretty simple in operation once you get over the “a ha” hump.

Bad things? Plenty. It’s written in Delphi, which is a poor choice for a plugin IMO. This means it is Windows-only VST, and always will be. (For a commercial product, I know from experience that you’re automatically denying 80% of the market of plug-in buyers.) The knobs which should be logarithmic (level, filter freqs, etc) are not, so their useful range is down at the bottom all squeezed together. The filters are plain-jane.

Good things? It’s easy to use once you figure it out, and the resulting audio is just completely out of hand. There are two separate randomize features; one for the effects and one for the timeline. The price is 30 Euros, which fits in to my worldview of plug-in pricing quite nicely. For the money, as long as you’re a Windows user, this is an excellent buy if you need/want insta-glitch. I recommend you grab the demo and spend some time figuring it out.

As an aside, I think it’s worth noting that, when I mention software on this site, it is important to remember that I didn’t get it for free, I take no advertising money, and I don’t know the guy that made it. In this day and age, when stealth marketing and “endorsements” are the norm, you can rest assured that when I say I like something, it’s because I actually like it.