dirty harry

Sounds pretty much like a C-64 that's been thrown down several flights of stairs and stomped on, and that's why I love it! The waveforms at it's disposal are all gnarly polypulses and otherwise jagged curves. Some of the waveforms are a sample of several cycles, producing a glitchy rattling effect in the higher registers. In fact, this synth makes so many flavours of broken circuit-bent noise, that it's come to be one of my favourites for lo-fi!

Three oscillators with a large selection of unhealthy waveforms, ring and sync, a very cool resonant lowpass, an amp and filter/pitch envelope, and two LFO's are at your disposal. Modulation possibilities are not infinite, and you'll find things you can't do, but that's all part of the game. It's about what you CAN do, and how gnarled and ripped you can make it sound :)

Of special note to me is the oscillator sync option, which is interesting in that it seems to sync according to the zero-crossings of the master, not just once per cycle. This means that the master, as well as the slave, will have an effect on the resultant timbre.

After the main synth section several options are present to further humiliate the sound. Bitrate reduction is on offer in a few flavours, as is a long menu of 'dirt' modifiers for the waveform, which are all subtly different and consist of such wonders as saturation, wave rectification, clipping, and forcing the waveform onto a landmine. Ok, I just made that up, but certainly you can expect injury to occurr here if need be, and often you'll end up with a signal containing DC-offset. You might want to have a highpass filter on standby.

Furthermore there's a pitch destabilizer with variable speed and offset, which can produce analogue style drift or wretched buzzing, and my favourite, the 'messy contacts' emulation section. This can be mixed in gradually and produces a variety of effects from red noise to a pulsating shadow underneath the sound, to almost slapback room type effects. It's both dirty and dimensional at the same time, and can really give sounds a unique and interesting character, and used subtly, it will just add some randomness to the waveform which is very welcome.

If you use circuit-bent, glitchy, broken sounding synth tones, I'm sure you'll love this synth. There's a huge range of tones from straight to completely %#~£ed and a unique quality I've not heard anywhere else. It's also 'dirt' cheap! Ha!Read Review