Dark (Redux)
TL;DW: Dark is a wordlength reducer that gives your music a blacker backdrop.
Since it’s only been two weeks, here’s an update-in-place! As in, this is what the plugin should have been.
Dark Redux is Dark, exactly as before, BUT now it has one added control. DeRez! Just like in the DeRez plugin, it zooms seamlessly down to 1 (or 0) bits. It’s continuous, not discrete: you can do one and a half bits or whatever, play it by ear. Except that unlike the DeRez plugin, it’s still Dark… so you can hear more clearly what the new wordlength reducer is doing.
It defaults to 0, which is exactly as it was before. Both the 24 and 16 bit settings derez, which means you can take it to 0 bit (silence) with 16 bit, switch to 24 bit, and the result is you’re listening to 8 bit. (if you need really specific behavior, you can use BitShiftGain before and after the plugin to get exact bit values).
This makes it possible to do old school sampling effects, dark bitcrushed sounds. It also demonstrates that the Dark algorithm is a bit special, because you have to really trash the wordlength to deteriorate the tone much. It’s more like a slightly noisier, slightly funkier, slightly gated grunge tone, even though the output is literally just bitcrushing. There isn’t even any smoothing applied to get the ‘dark’ tonality, it’s literally all a wordlength reducer, and with DeRez at 0 it’s exactly the original Dark plugin.
If there’s a problem or if you need to not see a control marked ‘DeRez’, my updates-in-place always leave the original file there, in this case renamed to DarkOriginal.zip(338k). They have the same ID and DAWs ought to be able to handle swapping the new one in, even on existing projects that use Dark, it’s just to make sure people can get back the original release if they ever need to.
This work is supported by Patreon. I hope you like it. :)
Hi Chris!
I love the sound of DeRez inside Dark but it has rendered the plug-in completely useless since the measured output no longer is 16/24 bits when DeRez is active!
Hi Chris, I have found IRs of old 80s reverb units like the SPX90 and Lexicon PCM70 and placing dark after the IR plugin makes it sound a bit more like the hardware.