GOREBANG — Audio and effects label.
Hot Fuzz
A free distortion and fuzz plugin for making deliberately ugly sounds.
A distortion/fuzz audio plugin that treats clipping and filtering as something to explore rather than tame. Built to be given away.
The idea
Most distortion plugins are built to sound good by default. Hot Fuzz is built to sound like whatever you point it at. The clipping stage is deliberately crude; the character comes from what you filter into it and what you filter back out.
It is free because the interesting part was the DSP, not the licensing.
What's in it
- One waveshaping stage with a small family of transfer curves, from soft asymmetric clip to full rectification.
- A pre-filter and a post-filter that can each run as low-pass, high-pass or band-pass. The pre-filter decides which harmonics get mangled; the post-filter decides which ones you keep.
- A gain structure with enough range to go from "slightly rude" to "the track is now a texture".
- Oversampled internally so the ugliness stays where you put it instead of aliasing back down the spectrum.
Development notes
The first version had a much more elaborate clipper with adjustable knees and bias. It sounded worse. The version that shipped removed almost every parameter that acted on the curve itself and moved the controls to the filters on either side. Almost everything people describe as the "sound" of a fuzz is a filter problem wearing a distortion costume.
Runs on the same DSP core that the 4B Pedal Platform uses on hardware, which means a curve prototyped in the plugin can move to a pedal without being rewritten.
Status
Released and maintained. Bug reports welcome; feature requests are read with interest and mostly declined.
Related work