DRIFT

DRIFT is a saturation effect. The transfer curve slowly wanders over time, so the harmonic character evolves as you play.

Synth Anatomy: "It's like a moving distortion."

How it works

Inside, four saturation curves run in parallel: tanh, sine fold, asymmetric and foldback. A Lorenz attractor decides how much of each one you hear, and the left and right channels each have their own attractor.

The saturation runs at 2x oversampling.

Controls

• Drive: gain into the saturation, up to 36 dB.
• Drift: how fast the curve wanders. At 0 the steady wandering stops. It also follows your playing: louder input moves it faster.
• Depth: lets the same chaos push Drive and Tone around too.
• Spread: how differently the left and right channels wander.
• React: makes the wandering speed up when a transient hits.
• Delay: a short delay, 1 to 50 ms, in front of the saturation, so every repeat gets distorted again.
• Feedback: how much of the delayed signal is added back to the input and fed into the delay again, up to 95%. At 0 the delay does nothing.
• Tone: a low-pass filter on the wet signal, from 200 Hz to 20 kHz.
• Mix: blends dry and wet with an equal-power crossfade. The Drive gain is compensated on the wet path.
• Output: output level, from minus 24 to plus 6 dB.

Formats

• iPhone and iPad: an AUv3 in AUM, GarageBand, Logic or any other AUv3 host, plus a standalone app. Needs iOS 14 or later.
• Mac and Windows: VST3 and CLAP, plus AU on Mac.

The loop in this demo is from the drumloop pack Pulse Grid.