STRANGE — Documentation
Overview
STRANGE is a distortion effect. A Lorenz attractor and a Logistic map run all the time and move the settings of the distortion, so the sound keeps moving while you play.
The input level nudges the chaos too: louder input pushes it harder.
Drive
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Drive | Gain into the distortion, from 1x to 16x. Low settings add warmth and a few harmonics, high settings push the signal hard into the mode. |
Chaos
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Chaos | How fast the chaos runs, from 1 to 200 Hz, and how strongly it affects the mode. At the low end the distortion drifts slowly. At the high end it changes quickly. |
Feedback
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Feedback | Sends the wet signal back to the input, before Drive, up to 95%. The fed-back signal is soft-limited, so it stays bounded. Low settings thicken the tone. High settings build up on themselves. |
Modes
Four modes. In each one the chaos moves different settings.
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Fold | A sine wavefolder. The driven signal is multiplied by a fold depth, from 1x up to about 9x, and passed through a sine. The chaos moves the fold depth and adds a small extra harmonic. |
| Shatter | Bitcrush plus sample-rate reduction. At full Chaos the bit depth moves between 16 and 3 bits and the sample rate is divided by up to about 60. |
| Warp | A comb resonator. The chaos moves its delay time between 2 and about 16 ms, and its own feedback grows with Chaos, up to 70%. |
| Glitch | Keeps recording the driven signal (input plus feedback, after Drive) and, at each freeze, plays the last chunk of it back once, like a skip back. Nothing is recorded during a freeze. Chunks are 30 to 200 ms long and the gaps between freezes are 25 to 400 ms. Higher Chaos makes both shorter and more irregular. Between freezes the driven signal passes through with a soft clip whose drive grows with Chaos. |
Tone
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Tone | A tilt EQ on the wet signal, pivoting at 900 Hz. Centered is flat. Turned fully up, the highs are up to 6 dB louder and the lows up to 6 dB quieter. Turned fully down, it is the other way around. The full 6 dB is only reached well above and below the pivot. |
Mix & Output
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Mix | A linear dry/wet blend. At 0 you hear only the dry signal, at 100% only the wet one. |
| Output | Output gain from minus 24 to plus 24 dB, applied after the blend. A soft clipper keeps the output at or below 0 dBFS. |
Signal Flow
Input + Feedback → Drive → Mode → Tone → Auto-gain → Mix → Output → Soft limiter
The chaos does not sit in the signal path. It moves the settings inside the mode.
The auto-gain matches the level of the wet signal to the input, within about minus 18 to plus 12 dB, so Drive and Feedback do not need manual level compensation.
Feedback takes the wet signal after Tone and Auto-gain and adds it to the input, before Drive.
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.