Choppy, Glitchy, Fuck Yeah!

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’ve been pondering a thread starter on glitch programming; nothing has really come to me that wouldn’t take the form of a tutorial (which I don’t find that interesting, at least to make) or a rant. So I’ll just provide some materials and we can go off on whatever tangent is appropriate. Don’t you wish I was your teacher at Full Sail? An education at that place might almost have been worth something.

In any case, what got me started on this whole thing was this video on GooTube, in which this Pix fellow demonstrates far better than I could type the CTRL-AL engine in the MachineDrum. I use this technique extensively, and while I kind of discovered it independently, I hadn’t taken it to the lengths that he has. Also, I’m trying to work out a plugin concept (much to Adam’s bemusement) based loosely on the technique exhibited in this video, which takes advantage of a quirky behavior in Live. It is fairly complicated to pull off, and can’t be done in real time, but the result is kind of nice, which is why I’ve been pondering how to do it in a plugin.

In any case, Replicant aside, I tend to do most all of my glitchy programming by hand. This is time consuming, of course, but once you get the hang of whatever your DAW uses for dealing with small chunks of audio, it is fairly productive. Currently, assuming I’m using the MachineDrum for rhythm, I’ll use the CTRL-AL “feature” to come up with something interesting, record the section, then go in and start chopping and moving about the audio file in Cubase to end up with what I want. Since I tend to record separate parts, I throw everything in a folder track when I’m done so it can be dealt with like an individual loop.

What’s your favorite methodology for doing this sort of thing? Are there any crafty videos on YouTube that I haven’t seen? Or are you just gonna say “I went to Full Sail, and look at me now, bitch! I’m the patchbay monkey in the finest studio in Pittsburgh!”

EDIT: I almost forgot the excellent videos from our good friends Sonniccouture that deal with using their KSP scripts with Kontakt. You can find them here and here.