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Stutter Edit's interface is clear, and relatively easy to navigate.

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Electronica legend Brian Transeau - better known as BT - has used and abused the 'stutter edit' technique on a decade's worth of albums, and for some time his secret weapon has been a plug-in of the same name.

His collaboration with iZotope sees Stutter Edit finally become a commercially available product. This MIDI-controlled effects plug-in works by stuffing incoming audio into a buffer and repeating snippets of it in various ways.

Further processing modules can be applied: there are gating, panning, filtering, stereo filtered delay, and bit-depth/sample-rate reduction. Each MIDI note will trigger what iZotope calls a "gesture" - essentially a preset combination of effects settings and associated patterns.

"Stutter Edit comes with some ace presets, but it feels too pricey."

There are numerous tempo-syncing features, so the resulting mayhem will lock up perfectly with your track. The user interface is unmistakably iZotope and easy to navigate.

BT in a box

Stutter Edit is easy to get going, although you do need to route MIDI into it to make it work. Anyone with a basic grip of their DAW's routing will have no problems, and iZotope provides a DAW-specific guide within the comprehensive help documentation for those who need it.

There are hundreds of presets from the likes of Richard Devine and BT himself, so it really is a case of plug and play.

We had a couple of hours of self-indulgent fun running tracks through the plug-in and messing with the pitch and mod wheels. By default, these control the global filter (a DJ-style combined low-pass/high-pass affair) and starting point in the gesture. This was all without touching a single control on the front panel.

Using even the simplest loops as a starting point, it's possible to go wild with the gestures, and the results are instantly musical. Once you get into editing the gestures, the software becomes more than just a novel curiosity.

Each module has 'split' sliders for its available parameters (eg, delay time for delays, bit depth for the bitcrusher), and while these can be set at fixed positions, the real fun is had by setting a start and end point.

When you hit a MIDI note, the parameter glides smoothly from beginning to end, then starts over. It needn't be a plain linear transition from minimum to maximum, as there's a setting for curve shape. Each effect can work in a stereo linked manner or with separate settings per channel.

We couldn't resist running three instances of Stutter Edit in series to see how it would hold up - this resulted in a complex sound with smooth transitions.

Much of what Stutter Edit does could be done manually in any DAW with some extensive audio chopping and effects routing, but that's nowhere near as simple and fun.

Matrix revolution

There are plenty of 'glitch' plug-ins on the market, but Stutter Edit's Stutter Matrix is one of the features that sets it apart. It enables you to restrict the Stutter module to just the slice sizes that you want to use.