Stutter Edit 2 Review
Annette Fazzari
Iconic American producer, DJ and musician BT is one of the pioneers of buffer glitch effects and, over the past 20 years, intricate stutters have cemented his signature sound. Back in 2010, he teamed up with Massachusetts-based iZotope to release Stutter Edit, which distilled the complex and time-consuming glitch-production processes down to a single keystroke.
There are plenty of presets that show off the range of the plug-in, including many designed by BT himself. These include vocal transitions, cinematic sound effects, master-bus fills and build-ups, sidechains and trance gates, beat grooves, synth-bass modulations and many more. If you want to build your own bank, you can drag and drop to assign individual gestures to each key on the keyboard. Settings such as bar length (from 16th notes to two bars), palindrome looping and how the effect reacts when the key is pressed and released are saved along with each gesture.
You could feed in a single slice or use different parts of the audio buffer in combination with reverse and left and right offsets to produce madcap stereo loops. You can select different grid sizes for the repeats and even chose random movement, ideal for jungle-style beat reshuffling. There are also jitter controls that can add pitch and rhythmic offsets to the left and right sides of the buffer, as well as pan and width controls.
Clicking on a parameter will see the curve editor display the envelope, and double-clicking will do so in full screen for easier editing. You can place multiple nodes and then curve each line, and you can draw freehand or snap to the grid. You can select specific time divisions and keyboard pitches, which are presented on the grid and make it easy to program fills and melodies. You can also reverse shapes, and save curves to recall them later. It would be useful if there was some kind of brush tool that let you quickly draw blocks but, even without such conveniences, this is intuitive enough, and the keyboard modifiers speed things up further.
I wasn't always a Mac user. There was a brief set of years where I was only PC. I wear the badge proudly. I'm not a loyalist to any company, I'm loyal to the best product, period. Part of my loyalty to the PC platform for a long time was due to the large assortment of plug-ins that were available to the PC, and were seemingly absent for the Mac. But, as Macs suddenly became capable of Bootcamp, and VMware Fusion, and so on, it became apparent that power shift had occurred. Suddenly, we could have the Mac and PC software all on one computer.
One plug-in in particular made this ability very important. But, that one byproduct of using a Mac (that being forgetting other apps because of how efficient everything is on the Mac) made me forget about this plug-in... Well, momentarily.
And, by the time I was fully invested in my new Mac, I decided that I didn't care about using Bootcamp anymore. I just wanted to work where it was most efficient. I did miss this plug-in though. Like many other musicians, I was hopelessly addicted to the plug-in, Glitch. A step sequencer that mangled audio, while still making it rhythmic. Seriously, it's the key to a never ending batch of loops, bad ass leads, basses and crazy cool remixes.
Well, a lot has changed. The Sequencer and the way the effects work in Glitch has been thoughtfully updated. In the past, Glitch only really allowed you to have one effect triggered at a time, however random the triggering might be. In Glitch 2, this is completely different. The effects can actually be triggered on top of one another, thanks to a vastly expanded grid.
But, don't worry, the guys developing Glitch 2 didn't forget those of us who praise Glitch for its randomness. In fact, they cleverly gave us the old randomizer that we loved in Glitch, in the form of a Randomizer with a grid lane of its own. As a result, you can have scenes where effects are set up to definitely play on specific beats. And, on some scenes, you can have the Randomizer only, randomly kicking out crazy effects arrangements.
Within each grid lane, and on each effect, you can also find Dice buttons that randomly generate new patterns for each effect. Or, you can go to an even higher level and have the scene itself randomly generate new scene, or mangle existing scenes. Seriously, if you're tricky enough, you can do full and true 'glitchy' little songs with Glitch... As long as you have an incoming signal.
Another beautiful features is the new ability to be able to trigger scenes via MIDI notes. This allows you to use Glitch 2 in a manner very similar to Stutter Edit, but very different at the same time. For Stutter Edit will only trigger individual effects. The effects are rhythmic in some cases and are slightly layered. Glitch 2, however, lets you trigger complex effect sequences that are perfectly in rhythm.
Installing Glitch 2 was as simple as it's always been. And, the simple fact that it's 32- and 64-bit made life just so much better, as I'm now someone that's transitioned fully over to 64-bit. Once I had everything going (and believe me, I was excited), I really did feel like I stepped back in time.
Glitch 2 performs just like the old game changer I was used to. Random stutters, slides, modulations and so on came in instantly and made the loops I was using completely new, with that added 'cool factor'.
As usual, I ran Glitch 2 over my entire mix first. I just had to hear what it would do to an entire track. And, like the days of old, it did a completely new and cool remix on the fly. But, to make things even more fun, I started playing with scenes and triggering scenes. This procedure, while it sounds difficult, was actually very simple. Thanks to so many random and mutate buttons, scene creation was a snap.
But, what really surprised me was how light Glitch 2 is on the old processor. I'm rocking an older Macbook Pro, so performance is something I'm constantly very aware of. Anytime I try new plug-ins, I'm always looking to see how large of a stake is claimed on my CPU. Glitch 2 took very little, if any.
Glitch 2 is a very well thought out upgrade to a plug-in that is sure to become one of your favorite tools within your arsenal. And, because it's supported for all major platforms (even Linux), it's crazy not to own it. Sadly, the price has gone up from what it used to be. It's now $60. But, if you consider the amount of cool that will be added into your new mixes... Well, this is small price to pay.
Sound Designer, Musician, Author... G.W. Childs has worn many hats. Beginning in the U.S. Army back in 1991, at the age of 18, G.W. began learning electronics, communications and then ultimately audio and video editing from the Department of Defense.Upon leaving the military G.W. went on to work for many exciting companies like Lu... Read More
The stutter edit, or stutter effect, is the rhythmic repetition of small fragments of audio, occurring as the common 16th note repetition, but also as 64th notes and beyond, with layers of digital signal processing operations in a rhythmic fashion based on the overall length of the host tempo.[1][2] The Stutter Edit audio software VST plug-in implements forms of granular synthesis, sample retrigger, and various effects to create a certain audible manipulation of the sound run through it, in which fragments of audio are repeated in rhythmic intervals.[3] The plug-in allows musicians to manipulate audio in real time, slicing audio into small fragments and sequences the pieces into rhythmic effects, recreating techniques that formerly took hours to do in the studio.[4] Electronic musician Brian Transeau (known as BT) is widely recognized for pioneering the stutter edit as a musical technique; he developed, coined the term, and holds multiple patents for the Stutter Edit software plug-in.[5][6][7][8]
A stutter edit "contains a single segment of audio repeated a number of times, giving a performance a decidedly digital flavor."[9] Stutter edits can go beyond 2,048th notes and can be measured in milliseconds, with layers of digital signal processing operations in a rhythmic fashion, and an individual note potentially containing within it many short fragments of sound.[10] Above a certain point, these repetitions transition from rhythmic to tonal frequencies, making musical notes out of the repeated audio.[11] These extremely short, fast groups of notes are often placed into the spacing of an eighth or sixteenth note in an otherwise "normal" bar, creating rhythmic accenting and patterns that call attention to a particular section. These patterns can be placed at the beginning of a bar, or towards the end for a more syncopated sound. One example is in the second verse of "Drop It Like It's Hot", Snoop Dogg mentions a DJ cut followed by a stutter edit and turntable scratch in reply.[12]
Transeau designed the plug-in to automate the arduous process of breaking audio into micro fragments and using them for new sounds, after experimenting with early versions of the software in his studio and in live performances.[8][14] Around 2006, Transeau formed the software company Sonik Architects to develop the Stutter Edit plug-in and related tools.[3][15] In 2010, Sonik Architects was acquired by iZotope,[16] and in January 2011, the Stutter Edit plug-in, based on Transeau's patented technique, was released by iZotope and Transeau.[17][18][2][19] It works by constantly sampling the incoming audio and storing it in a buffer, so that it can be used for repeating short loops or slices, with everything automatically sync'ed to the host tempo. Effects are applied using "Gestures", made up of one or more effects modules or a noise generator, each tied to a single MIDI note. It can be used for live laptop sets or DJing, or in the studio.[1] BreakTweaker, a drum sequencer for beat layering, programming and composition that allows the user to manipulate audio at a micro level, was released by iZotope soon after.[3]
It's been nine months since I started to live a nomadic life and do full-time travel and photography. To stay productive on the road, I had to exchange my old and trusty desktop PC for a portable solution. I'm a Windows user and decided to go with the Dell XPS 9510. In this article, I explain why and share how it held up over the past months.
c80f0f1006