Overview
DRIFT is a saturation effect. The transfer curve slowly wanders over time, so the harmonic character evolves as you play.
Inside, four saturation curves run in parallel: tanh, sine fold, asymmetric and foldback. A Lorenz attractor decides how much of each one you hear. The left and right channels each have their own attractor.
Drive
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Drive | Gain into the saturation, from 0 to 36 dB. Low settings add a little harmonic warmth, high settings clip hard. The Drive gain is compensated on the wet path, so raising Drive mostly changes the character, not the level. |
Drift
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Drift | How fast the curve wanders, from 0 to 100%. At 0 the steady wandering stops. If React is above 0, transients can still move the curve. Drift also follows the input level: louder signals move the curve faster. |
Depth
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Depth | Lets the same chaos also move Drive and Tone. At full depth it moves Drive by roughly 3 dB and the Tone cutoff by roughly 2 octaves either way, and peaks can go a little further. At 0 only the curve wanders. |
Spread
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Spread | How independent the two channels are. At 0 both channels use the same averaged curve. At 100% each channel wanders on its own, which gives a wide, moving stereo image. The default is 100%. |
React
| Control | Description |
|---|
| React | How sensitive the wandering is to transients. At 0 it ignores them. Turned up, a hit in the input makes the curve speed up for a moment, and higher React values let smaller transients trigger it. |
Delay
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Delay | A short feedback delay, 1 to 50 ms, placed in front of the saturation. Its repeats go through Drive and the saturation again, so each repeat comes out more distorted. Times this short do not sound like echoes. They color the sound. |
| Feedback | How much of the delayed signal is added back to the input and fed into the delay again, from 0 to 95%. At 0 the delay does nothing. |
Tone
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Tone | A low-pass filter on the wet signal, from 200 Hz to 20 kHz. Lower the cutoff for a darker, warmer sound, raise it to let the top end through. |
Mix & Output
| Control | Description |
|---|
| Mix | Blends the dry and wet signals with an equal-power crossfade. The dry signal is taken from the input before Delay and Drive, and it is delayed to match the wet path, so blending does not cause comb filtering. |
| Output | Final level, from minus 24 to plus 6 dB. |
Signal Flow
Input → Delay → Drive → Saturation (2x oversampled) → Tone → Mix → Output
The dry signal for Mix comes from the input, before Delay and Drive.
The 2x oversampling adds a small latency. DRIFT reports it to the host, so plugin delay compensation lines it up automatically.
Formats
- iPhone and iPad: an AUv3 that runs inside AUM, GarageBand, ApeMatrix, Audiobus or any AUv3 host, with several instances working independently, plus a standalone app. Requires iOS 14.0 or later.
- Mac and Windows: VST3 and CLAP, plus AU on Mac.
