Stuck on repeaters
With glitched and repeated sounds now part and parcel of many electronic music styles, plugins that enable you to create these sounds have become ever-more popular.
There are all kinds of repeating tools on the market: what follows is a selection of some of our favourites.
NEXT: Sugar Bytes Effectrix
Sugar Bytes Effectrix
This glitchy multieffect includes a scratch-style looper and stuttering effects amongst other things. It has a step sequencer built in, but it really shines when played live, with patterns assignable to MIDI.
iZotope Stutter Edit
iZotope’s collaboration with BT is a powerful live performance tool, assigning a mind-boggling array of effects to MIDI keys. How much you use the stuttering/repeating combinations may decide whether it’s worth the considerable price tag. It doesn’t bring much new to the table but is a blast to use.
Smart Electronix LiveCut
Unlike most other repeating plugins, this makes less rigid cuts to form new blocks and phrases. While not as extensive as some others here, it is freeware and good for getting your experimental glitch on with.
Beat Repeat
Ableton Live’s ace plugin is arguably the best beat-repeating tool of all. It lets you select how much of the beat you want to repeat, with tweakable parameters for gating, pitchshifting, filtering and more. This is one of the components of Live that has users of other DAWs looking on in envy.
Illformed Glitch 2
Version 2 of the plugin that launched a thousand IDM tracks, complete with long-awaited Mac OS X support. Glitch 2 boasts nine effect modules and, like Effectrix, it features its own step sequencer.