Sound granulators/rearrangers/stutter algorithms/etc can often be love it or hate it tools for many people. Many people like to chop up and refigure their drum breaks, programs and sounds, but their methods can vary wildly. Some like to do everything manually – buried in mountains of edits and parameters and grids and inserts. Others like to use stuff like ReCycle, BBCut (and its many implementations) and SupaTrigger – to name but a few.
I’m not sure where I sit on the whole thing. Generally I tend to go for the more manual route – I think it’s because I like to have full control over the musical process, I like the musical ideas to be mine and not a variant of some algorithm that someone else created – falling into the trap of thinking like someone else. I don’t have any thought out rationale for it – and I certainly have some of the tools mentioned above installed on my computer (and their siblings) as they’re useful to have around, if only to get inspired when searching for new sounds and ideas. But generally when it comes to the sounds that find their way into my final work, I tend to go a bit manual.
But whatever you think of all that, I’ve been playing around today with a little gizmo called Glitch, which is a freeware VST tool that allows for applying various rhythm-oriented manipulations – stuff like chops, stutters, recuts. It’s pretty funky in that it’s actually quite in-depth: it’s got a lot of functionality and you have a reasonable amount of control over what it’s actually doing, rather than some programs which are almost black boxes that have a few parameters that can be played with.
This has a sequencer for the various types of manipulations, and the parameters on offer for each are pretty detailed. At the very least it’s a fun way to completely mess up sounds and breaks and some of the results are really quite interesting. I think it’s very likely to be the most impressive free package I’ve seen offering this kind of functionality.
Anyway, if you’re into going for some haywire manipulations, have a play with Glitch, it’s an interesting tool. Next time I want to do some really intense edits on a break, I’ll certainly have a good think about whether I want to be sitting in front of a grid or writing out sub-divisions and rhythms on paper. Which option I’ll choose is still unknown, but at the very least it’s the kind of thing that’s worth having there just in case. The flexibility it offers is certainly tempting.
Naturally, of course, this is worlds away from a dude like Burial (who I’ve been listening to a fair bit of the last week and really digging) who does all his beats in SoundForge. No grids or anything. Insane.
