BITPUNK Review
JMG Sound has released a new bitcrusher dubbed Bitpunk, it is a highly abrasive bit reducer and bit scrambler. The UI is one of those “roughed up” skeuomorphic designs that many people find distasteful, personally, if done well, I find them to be works of art, not preferred for my daily tools, but always a nice fun addition to play with. Speaking of the UI, you’ll want to right click the screen and set it to “tablet mode” which makes the controls handle similarly to almost any other plugin you’ve ever used. In terms of UX, United Plugins line of devices lean towards the Melda end of interfacing, meaning you won’t be able to double click to reset controls, and instead it’ll pop out dial pad where you can type in the exact value you want. The thing that really sold me on this one is its ability to swap bits with a side chain input, scrambling the information from one sound into another.
How does that sound? Completely broken, which for some of us is a good thing. It’s a tricky effect to nail, Ideally each source is tuned and fairly simple, if possible you can match to the sample rate for swapping that that’ll line up with the waveforms, swapping complex inputs ends up being incredibly noisy, not to mention, the B side of this plugin seems to be WAY too loud. Use a limiter with this one. They do give you quite a variety of options with the swapping, all of which basically sound like noise, but if you get the right magical combination of inputs can offer an actually interesting variety of tones. There’s a few different patterns to blend the swapping in interesting ways, or even dial it in your self, hand selecting or randomizing which bits get swapped. You’re not just limited to swapping either, you get options to mute or invert, similar to what we find in Coldfire’s bit crusher effect.
On the “circuit boards” you’ll find a few other controls, some sliders to adjust the input signal, and some fun stuff up top. Rate is the sample rate reduction, it sounds great, nice and crystalline and shimmery. Shift is a frequency shifter, this one gets pretty nasty, it’s definitely not “clean”. After that is “error” which is sort of an auto stutter effect, not much control over it, just a percentage chance that it happens, but still fun nonetheless. below these controls is a feedback delay, it sounds incredibly lo-fi and digital, really great for glitchy combs and resonance. Modulating these controls makes for a nice auto glitching effect, there’s plenty of those out there, and this one has a flavor, but do demo it, as that flavor is pretty specific. I found the press and heat controls to be far too subtle compared to the rest of this plugin, but the filters and mix knob were appreciated.
I’m not certain how often I’ll break this one out, it sure does do something, but it was a bit more than I’d like to pay for what it does, even on sale. I think the main milage I’ll get from it is randomizing the controls and sampling/ chopping all the madness that comes from this device. It has strong circuit bent vibes, and that’s not a bad thing. I do believe there are some fun experiments to be had with side-chain swapping, which was my main justification for purchasing Bitpunk, as I have nothing else that can do this. This isn’t a bad review by any means, I think it’s a cool plugin, I’m just hesitant to suggest it unless you completely understand what you’re getting into and why you’d want to do bit swapping.
EDIT: it looks like Mbitfun can do bit swapping from side chain, which is a free plugin, however, I didn’t find any way to do morphing patterns in Mbitfun. Additionally it didn’t look like Mbitfun had the “error” control.
I’m seeing multiple people saying htis is “just reskinned Mbitfun”, I’m not sure where they are getting this from, or if that is true, I’ll have to take a bit more time with them side by side to be sure.
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BITPUNK: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/32-Bit-Crusher/10758-BITPUNK?a_aid=61c378ab215d5