disintegration at your fingertips
degradation engine introduces the vibrant heart of an analogue synth to the fractured forgetfulness of microcassette.
the story
the world no longer needs convincing of the beauty of analogue synthesisers. warm and rich, tactile and imperfect, there is simply some kind of magic to these evocative instruments.
like many, my first days exploring analogue alchemy were spent looking down with wonder at the tiny bronze chassis of korg's volca keys. plenty of synths have come into my studio since then - bigger, more "pro"-looking things with more keys and buttons and voices and features - but the quirky little volca maintains an undeniable personality that I've yet to hear in any other synth.
soon after my first foray with synthesis came a fascination with microcassettes. they make sound physical; fragile; vulnerable to the passage of time. through tape, a sound can become damaged not just in an abstract sense, but physically, and this degradation has a bittersweet beauty all of its own.
so, what is degradation engine? in short, it's an entirely new kind of synth, with oscillators lovingly sampled from the volca. it's got all the parameters you'd expect, but it also gives you direct control over loss, which lets you explore anwhere between the raw, vibrant sound of analogue waveforms and the time-worn, nostalgic magic of cassette.
the instrument
some fractured world between the new and the half-remembered.
degradation engine works very similarly to a regular subtractive synth - you get your filter, an ADSR, a mixer, and some handy effects. what sets it apart is its two oscillators, which each have two knobs controlling "loss".
these knobs fade between the oscillator's raw signal and a degraded version sampled through a microcassette tape. therefore, with each oscillator, you can choose any point between a raw analogue waveform and total tape fragility.
not only this, but each oscillator has two types of degradation, with the samples recorded both at full-speed and half-speed. full-speed has a more brittle sound whereas half-speed is warmer and rounder - and again, you can go anywhere between these two extremes.
and bearing in mind that there are two waveforms per oscillator, it gets very deep very quickly...
facts and figures
two waveshapes (saw and square) and two degradation types (full-speed and half-speed) per oscillator
18 total parameters allowing deep control, including reverb and overdrive
each oscillator sampled individually, meaning no phasing issues
full stereo capability
24-bit samples; 48kHz sample rate
606MB install size
works on the full version of kontakt 7.6.1 or newer - will not work on the free "kontakt player" plugin!
the sounds
here's an overview video to give you a better idea of the whole thing.
want to hear the engine in action?
and for more sounds, here are a couple of demos below.
