Fracture2
TL;DW: Fracture2 is a wavefolder that allows more extreme disruption.
Fracture2 is straight up a West Coast wavefolder, in a plugin. You’ve got Drive, Fracture, Threshold, Output and Dry/Wet controls. Drive is basically overdrive like in Mackity, and you can get unity gain at a setting of 0.1, and Output and Dry/Wet are what you’d expect.
Fracture makes the signal go exponential before folding. What this means is, if it’s at zero you’ll get a simple wavefold. With a sine, that’ll create a distinct overtone (stronger than the original Fracture) which will slow down as it nears the top, then reverse. As you increase Fracture, the pitch of the wavefold increases because the wave you feed in will start folding faster and faster the more it folds: it will also open up the unfolded part of the wave, making it more dynamic. On non-tonal sounds, this makes the effect dryer and punchier and more aggressive.
Threshold is by request from a fan who asked in Youtube comments, and whom I’ve got some things in common with. The idea is basically, can you make the folding part only take up a certain amount of space, like back to the zero point but not past? Turns out you can! And what this does is, it lets you have a volume control on the fold part. So, at zero threshold, you have a soft clip (or, with Fracture, a weird expando-clip like High Impact). As you increase it, the wavefold comes out of the clipping, expanding down (or up) from the flat-top of the wave, with 0.5 going to the center of the waveform and 1.0 doing a full-amplitude wavefold.
Because this effect lends itself to the Rack port of my plugins (where you can feed audio rates into any controls), all the controls except Fracture are smoothed for better automation. I don’t do this all the time, but it just seems to be the kind of effect where you might be sending sine waves into it (revealing zipper noises) and then modulating it like crazy, so it’s using the same smoothing that’s in the Z2-series filters.
Hope you like it!
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
VCV Rack module
Thank you so much for making this plugin.
I may be mistaken, but it doesn’t appear that Fracture264.dll made it into the Windows zip.
Fixing that now :)
many thanks for your awesome work.
if you’re taking fan requests for distortions, what I’d love to see is a serial clipping utility, which would essentially be like 4 super basic controls: 1) # multiplier of stages in series, 2) dB of input gain per stage, 3) output gain compensation on/off 4) hard vs soft clip.
I got the idea when researching the E-MU e6400 and the Z-Filters, as you know, one of the tricks was making sure you had a hot signal pre-filter, but if you manually boost gain on the unit (or the EX3 VST, which is quite nice) you can do it 1dB at a time, so that applying permanent/destructive boost to the 16bit audio repeatedly, you end up getting a serial saturation that compounds on itself and sounds much better, since boosting 1dB six times in a row into a hard clip sounds very different than straight clipping 6dB.
I’ve made a macro/rack version with a bunch of PurestGain and Cliponly2/Clipsoftly instances, but it’s not very CPU efficient/practical and the -0.4dB gain drop post-clip adds another wrinkle, a single plug-in that does it all would be amazing!!! Even better would be a ZHighpass3/ZLPF3/ZBP3 with the serial clipper pre-filter and a built in soft/hard clip on the output! thank you for your time and amazing plugins!
Thanks for making this plugin! But how do I install it?