Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:29 am
I was playing around with LADSPA FX and got a combo of them that seems to simulate most of the major things done when circuit bending. (If anyone doesn't know what circuit bending is, then you'll have to look it up. Involves hacking various audio devices or noise making toys and altering or shorting the circuits in unintended ways to get new sounds.)
So here's the combo:
Audio Divider
Disintegrator
Decimator
Smooth Decimator
Pointer Cast Distortion
Signal Sifter
So what do they do? Hard to describe to be honest, but I'll try. My descriptions are more of an analogy than scientific.
Audio Divider - Makes something sound like it's played on a cheap sample player with a low battery.
Disintegrator - Combines the source with noise. (Not sure if pink or white.) That makes the sound more "crunchy".
Decimator - Basically lets you force stuff into low-fi samples. You get to control bit-depth and sample rate, exactly what it says on the dials. Can get stuff to sound like 8 or 16 bit samples, and even more lo-fi than that. Like audio coming out of a cheap toy or something. Also good for chip-tuney stuff. Very fun!
Smooth Decimator - Similar to decimator in some ways, but plenty different. Let's you get more glitchy kinds of noises with chime-like feedback and inherent fade-in/fade-out effects.
Pointer Cast Distortion - Hard distortion based on cutoff frequency. Some ways it's like a guitar amp distortion, but also produces some interesting glitchy sound artifacts depending on how you play with it.
Signal Sifter - Very much like turning a radio tuner a little off station and getting those side-band noises. Kind of keen for purposely making warbly whistly weak or interfering radio station sounds. (Kinda bummed that hooking it to an LFO made the program crash. YMMV.)
There might be one or two more LADSPA FX appropriate for this kind of thing (pitch shifters or scalers perhaps?), but these seem to do almost all the cool noisy glitchy distorted circuit-bending kind of things in regards to whatever source audio they're applied to.
So here's the combo:
Audio Divider
Disintegrator
Decimator
Smooth Decimator
Pointer Cast Distortion
Signal Sifter
So what do they do? Hard to describe to be honest, but I'll try. My descriptions are more of an analogy than scientific.
Audio Divider - Makes something sound like it's played on a cheap sample player with a low battery.
Disintegrator - Combines the source with noise. (Not sure if pink or white.) That makes the sound more "crunchy".
Decimator - Basically lets you force stuff into low-fi samples. You get to control bit-depth and sample rate, exactly what it says on the dials. Can get stuff to sound like 8 or 16 bit samples, and even more lo-fi than that. Like audio coming out of a cheap toy or something. Also good for chip-tuney stuff. Very fun!
Smooth Decimator - Similar to decimator in some ways, but plenty different. Let's you get more glitchy kinds of noises with chime-like feedback and inherent fade-in/fade-out effects.
Pointer Cast Distortion - Hard distortion based on cutoff frequency. Some ways it's like a guitar amp distortion, but also produces some interesting glitchy sound artifacts depending on how you play with it.
Signal Sifter - Very much like turning a radio tuner a little off station and getting those side-band noises. Kind of keen for purposely making warbly whistly weak or interfering radio station sounds. (Kinda bummed that hooking it to an LFO made the program crash. YMMV.)
There might be one or two more LADSPA FX appropriate for this kind of thing (pitch shifters or scalers perhaps?), but these seem to do almost all the cool noisy glitchy distorted circuit-bending kind of things in regards to whatever source audio they're applied to.