NEEDLEPOINT Review

Unfiltered Audio’s Needlepoint is an extensive vinyl simulator effect. Designed at first to replace sample based vinyl crackle simulation, the team at Unfiltered Audio took this idea to the extreme, using generative sound design to produce a variety of crackle types with adjustments over the abundance and volume of three different sizes of “dust”.

Wow and flutter simulate natural pitching effects caused by a warped record. An age control applies high pass filtering and subtle saturation to mimic older recordings. There’s a detailed noise control for that background texture, this can be static or it can follow amplitude. There’s filters for each section to carve out a specific vinyl effect and finally a playback section that allows you to pitch, spindown, or even loop the audio in the same way a record might loop a broken groove.

It’s a fairly detailed system that really lets you get in and customize the perfect vinyl crackle, perfect for adding that texture to your lofi beats without having to resort to the exact same texture you might find in your sample library. As a creative sound designer, this plugin may seem a bit boring, you can ofcourse randomize the spindown, pitch, and broken controls to get some glitching, but the fun really comes in when you use Needlepoint as a sound source. The crackles are a great texture to amplify and push into resonators and spectral processing, and modulating the various dust nodes in bitwig gives produces an entropic sources of clicks and pops that never produce the same pattern twice. I enjoy using Needlepoint to get myself away from synthesis and just focussed on effects processing. Run it into Lo-fi-af and randomize all of the controls and you have an instant infinite glitch generator.