Dipping my toe in 'glitch' FX. I'm wondering if there are people here who have both these products and can offer suggestions as to which (and why) they prefer.

About 10 years ago I did a lot of 'Max Headroom' style little FX by hand. Took forever. I recently started playing around with an old copy of Glitch 1.3 which sounds -very- interesting right out of the box but not all that easy to use.

But I just became aware of Glitch 2.0 and Stutter Edit. They both seem to do similar things. iZotope looks more 'high end' but both seem much easier to use.

Just wondering if there is a clear 'winner' for experienced users. I'm too much of a novice to know at this point.

Suggestions?

TIA,

---JC

take a look at izotope breaktweaker

Personally, I prefer Sugar Bytes Turnado and Effectrix to either of those. I actually sold Stutter Edit after buying Turnado.

Interesting. The Turnado demos are pretty much -exactly- what I'm looking for. I'll give that a try. I wonder if it works as well inside a sequencer (which is where I'll be using it... as opposed to DJing.)

Thanks/


PS to Webmaster: Man WTF is going on with this web site? Server crash city.

Looks more like Battery or did I miss something? I mainly want to apply 'glitch' or 'tapestop' or 'turntable' effects to audio tracks in Cubase. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

They do different things so you have to check them out to see which one you prefer. I would say Glitch2 is easier to use but it comes without presets which some might not like.

I don't think I ever used Turnado but I never liked Effectrix because the effects themselves are weak compared to Glitch.

iZotope BreakTweaker is another thing entirely compared to SE, Glitch or Effectrix. Again, check it out for yourself to see if you like it.

Also check out LiveCut which is free. Too random for my taste but as it is free there is no reason not to try it!

Alistair

Thanks. The problem is that I'm too old. :D All my references probably wouldn't make sense. But what I'm looking for is to to short 'stutters' or glitches like Amon Tobin did or the beginning of the movie 'Stop Making Sense'. Or that old American TV show 'Max Headroom'.

I used to chop a 4 beat phrase into about 100 parts and make it sound like a broken CD player for a few seconds. I'm not really trying to do 'beats'.

I just want to automate the chopping and then experiment with repeatable glitches.

What I dlsliked about Glitch 1.3 was that it would do something -great- but then I could never get it to do the same thing again. Whatever I get has to be repeatable.

Got anything like that?

PS: Anyone using Molekular? I've got Komplete, but it looks -really- unintuitive.


---JC

I know what you mean.

Glitch is very good to do what you want. When you open Glitch (1 & 2), the basic preset is set to launch random effects. My first step is always to remove the random effect triggers and replace them by programmed repeatable effects that I control. This is very easy to do once you understand how it works. Just remove all the bars on the top line. (The top line is the random effect trigger line) and draw bars on the lines of the specific effects you want to trigger. So if you want to trigger a gate effect on the last quarter of the loop, just draw a bar that spans the last quarter of the loop on the gater line. If you want a delay effect on the first half of the loop, just draw a bar that spans half the length of the loop on the delay line. Etc.

Then on the bottom part of the plugin you can tweak the effects themselves. Like how fast you want the delay effect to be. (1/4 note or 1/2 note etc).

Molekular is amazing but it isn't anywhere near as easy to program as Glitch! And it doesn't exactly do the typical glitching thing you seem to be after. At least not as easily as Glitch.

Alistair

I love the original freeware glitch and am looking to upgrade soon... that said, glitch is so good I just haven't found the need to upgrade yet.

I recently got hold of the Vengeance Glitch Bitch and so far I`m loving. So easy to use and sounding good too.
With stutter plugins, I find that you still need to do some editing to the bounced file, to get sounding nice and tight, but none of that with the Glitch Bitch.

Vengeance Sound

Also recently bought GB. Really nice little plug. Superb workflow. It needs a dongle but is totally worth the hazzle.

I'm big into glitch stuff so I do have/had some weird hardware that's not like plugs.

MASF Possessed
Squarewave Parade teaspoon
Shruthi-1 DSP (microlooper)
Boss Sp202

In sofftware I've used the destoryfx "buffer override, fully automatable and really f-ed up if you want to. Destroy FX : free VST plugins, free Audio Units

There is always Gross Beat from Image Line

Gross Beat

Makes me miss Windows, it really does.

Another option is to use guitar rig. I found I could do the same things with built in Tracktor fx. Its also easy to map it to drum pads for some on/off action. Really cool.

They have a built in FX Masher now for exactly what you want.

THANKS!

I'll look at it. It's a bit pricey for something I'll probably only use once in a while

BUT it has me now thinking differently.

-Maybe- what I should be doing is looking for a tool that:

a) loads 'loops' with the various syllables I want to each MIDI key (like Battery) but then

b) Can assign an effect (spindown, stutter) to be triggered by each MIDI -key-

Got anything like -that-?

I have Battery, but it doesn't have any built-in glitchy fx like that. Also it only has 4 outputs.

I actually forgot about that one. Remember doing some cool stuff with it and was easy to control it for some tight glitches.

You can use groove agent and have the pads trigger fx per pad.

Thanks for all the feedback. Where I'm at now, I'm leaning towards Stutter Edit. Not sure -yet-. I originally found SutterEdit overwhelming but the more I play with it, the more it seems like they really knew what they were doing with the concept. It's for guys like me even though I didn't know it.

Guitar Rig has some -great- Traktor FX. And Cubase actually has this thing 'LoopMash FX' which does a lot of the basics.

Molekular is also cool, but as they so often do, they get cutesy with their nomenclature rather than just using SIMPLE, STANDARD terminology.

GlitchBitch is fantastic, but it's strictly for live use... not within a DAW really.

Another thing I realised is that most of what I want is just a bunch of grain delays mapped to various keys. Duuuuuh.

There seem to be 2 approaches to this... there's Glitch and there's Stutter Edit.

Glitch and all the 'sequencer' based plugs work fine if your mind works in a certain way.. like a real DJ. You program the various sequences and you have to think like working with a real deck. What is frustrating is that I wish you could use them more like a DJ with -2- decks... you need a second sample to cut to.

Anyhoo... don't want to think like a DJ anymore. It's too jarring to me to be using a DAW and then 'mind switch' to DJ just for a few bars as needed.

StutterEdit works like an instrument you -play-. It takes time to set up the various 'gestures' but once you do, you know exactly what will happen. It's like working with a drum machine like PadShop or Battery or Groove Agent, but you're only loading one sample. So in short, it keeps my brain ins the same mode I'm used to playing a keyboard.

Say what now?...

1. Couldn't figure out how to get it to 'record' my 'moves'.

2. You can only do -one- trick at a time with it. (Albeit it's a fabulous trick.)

If I'm wrong, please enlighten me. The manual is a bit terse.

Well you can select the preset you want to use or design your own one and then automate the glitch button to punch in and out. You can also automate the parameters. Or you could take it a step further and load a few Glitch Bitches with different presets and switch between them with the automations. I`ve become a surgeon with it

Of that I have no doubt. If I were committed to this stuff, I can going nuts with grain delays and dozens of these things like that 'Tim Exile' guy.

But frankly, I was looking for something -simple-. Learning to -really- control this stuff like a surgeon is a few hundred hours I'm not gonna do.

Hell, I can't figure out how to get GlitchBitch to respond to Cubase MIDI.

But thanks.

I just wanted to give an update for any further travellers. I've been having a certain amount of instant gratification with an unlikely combo: Groove Agent One and LoopMash FX (both included in Cubase.)

I've never paid much attention to Cubase's built-in plugs, but these have a couple of advantages:
1. You can slice an audio event into hitpoints in one go and then just drag the whole thing in one step to Groove Agent and it maps the pads.

2. You can then use LoopMash as an FX plug-in and assign it to the same MIDI track. This gives you a number of vanilla 'DJ' FX like spin-down, spin-up, flams, reverse,
etc.

So left hand triggers the pads. Right hand works the FX.

It's probably baby steps for experienced people, but in 5 minutes I was able to do pretty much the entire 'Psycho Killer' schtick. Which is great because the learning curve on all these things was giving me a headache.

There`s so many different methods you can use to glitch. What you did sounds like yet another good method. All those baby steps add up really fast though. You are most certainly going in the right direction.