HighGlossDither
TL;DW: If you like truncation and artificial vibe, try this!
Here’s an Airwindows science experiment!
The idea here was to identify things about truncation that some people (maybe crazy people, but people nonetheless) like, and build them into a dedicated dither. This video includes extensive exploration of truncation, TPDF and flat dithers besides HighGlossDither, so there’s an educational value as well. As for audio value, the important thing to remember is that this one is designed to act like truncation in important ways… so it’s ‘broken’ and you shouldn’t use it for naturalistic things, and you probably shouldn’t use it unless you’ve ever chosen truncation instead of dither, on purpose, because you wanted the edgier, crunchier, different-textured sound of truncation for what you were doing.
If that’s ever you, this is an alternate way to get your sounds.
The deal with truncation is that it turns the fine details of your mix into a roaring, grunging mess of unnatural noise. The secret of it is, that stuff can act like some horrible sort of parallel compression. It’ll hang onto the tails of notes way longer than it should, and it’ll add intense bit-crusher-like effects to quiet sounds.
HighGlossDither uses a special, more uniform-sounding quadratic residue sequence instead of real randomness to sorta ‘diffract’ sounds into crunchier versions of themselves, and applies it at a quieter level than true dither. The result is a hybrid between dither and truncation: rather than dropping quietly into a sea of noise, quiet sounds get hyped and distorted, but they still behave a lot more normally than truncated sounds do. You get the crazy tonal hype, but a better approximation of the proper relative volume levels of the sounds. And you get a sort of noise but it’s quieter than TPDF is, and also serves a purpose of interacting with the sounds.
Most people shouldn’t like this. I’m introducing it first to get it out of the way… but who knows? Maybe you’re looking to bring out the next generation of Finnish forest psy trance, and the last thing you want is for the molecular structure of your music to sound natural. Well, HighGlossDither might be right up your alley! You don’t have to resort to truncation to have the finest details of your audio sounding weird and unreal. Take it up another level, with my blessing.
Or maybe you’d prefer your audio sounding, you know, good. If so, stay tuned :)
To support these kinds of researches, and protect my ability to be honest about this stuff (no sense trying to put this out as if it was normal!) please support my Patreon. As you can see, I’m able to try things outside the boundaries of normal commercial behavior, and because I’m not selling the plugins I don’t have to pretend they’re more generally useful than they are: if I’m trying something really strange I’ll say so. HighGlossDither is strange. Enjoy playing with it, and there’s more relevant stuff coming soon. :)
I´m using ableton live and I can`t repeat your demonstration.
Especially dosn`t appear the noise wenn using the 2 bitshiftgains with -16bit and +16bit.
Is this why I´m using ableton?
Tried it out today again, but it seems that the 2 dithers (TPDF and Highgloss) don`t work under windows(Win7 64bit)? Or am I making something wrong? I used a 24bit sample and in ableton live as plugins in that order: bitshiftgain -16bit – TPDF (or highgloss) – bitshiftgain +16bit – purestgain with different parameters. All under a ableton live 32bit-version. Dither on or off no difference.
Thank you a lot for help!
PS: I love it how you explain all these things!!!
The actual order of the plugins is purestgain/bsg-16/tpdf/bsg+16
Unless the PurestGain instance is FIRST (I know it looks like it’s last but it’s really first) you can’t fade stuff down into the dither noise
Thanks! It works now with Cantabile! What ableton makes with it, I don`t know. I prooved your advice there too, but nothing happens. Perhaps someone who reads this, with ableton on his PC, will find the trick …
These experiments are fascinating. I have met engineers who like truncation. Never understood that myslef but I like you’re parallel compression example, it kind of makes sense seeing it like that. HighGloss isn’t something I’d ever see myself using specifically but the examples and blend between truncation and TPDF are still interesting enough to discuss.