Grime space — a lo-fi, dirty delay/reverb/spatializer

Imagine, if you would, that a buzzing fluourescent bulb were made into a delay. That an echo were run through a broken telephone. That flangers were made from hot wires.

Grime space utilizes a distortion source I discovered by accident. Inspired by some of the new reverbs in the Empress Reverb, I was playing with delay/reverb ideas. I started toying around with the controls of a diffuser, and I found that, when its gain was increased to maximum and its diffusion was set to minimum, it produced some truly unique distortions: crackly, dynamic, smeared, grimy noises.

Tucked in the feedback path of a delay, along with a semi-resonant filter, and slightly off-kilter modulation, Grime Space produces everything from busted tape delays, distorted choruses, noisy squalls, grungy reverbs… weird stuff. Pretty, pleasant echoes, this is not.

Every time I use this patch, I find something new. The diffusers are also hiiiiiighly dynamic, so even in the same settings, it can sound quite different. Heck, even fed the same audio on each side of the signal path it can sound different.

The signal path is stereo throughout.

A special thanks to my patrons on Patreon for their support: Rob Flax, Stepan Grammatik, brockstar, Mats Unnerholm, D Sing, Will Scott, drew batchelor, Miguel, Steve Bragg, Joab Eastley, Tomi Kokki, Mitch Lantz, Ben Norland, Daniel Morris, Roman Jakobej, Mark Crosbie, and Steve Codling!

If you would like to support my work on ZOIA, please visit patreon.com/chmjacques

Controls:

Stompswitches:

Left, latching — switches between long (~30 ms – 2 s; echoes) and short (~0.02 ms – 30 ms; weird flangers and choruses) delay times. Works in conjunction with the “rise time” and “fall time” controls to produce pitch swells.
*There is a light next to the “Time” control: when the delay is short, the light is red; when the delay is long, the light is aqua

Middle, latching — turns modulation on and off; when the modulation is on, a pixel between the “mod depth” and “mod rate” controls will begin to flash in time with the modulation

Right, momentary — increases the feedback to maximum; in some settings this will produce feedback squalls (especially when the delay is set to short delay times), runaway oscillation, or merely amplify the repeats

Front panel:

The controls are clustered in four groups that pertain to specific functions:

Timing related controls are blue

Controls that relate to the sound of the delay are yellow

White is sort of “global” controls

Magenta is modulation

Timing:

The big one is time:

When the delay is short (red light), this can range anywhere from flanging and comb filtering to chorusing… maybe long enough for some doubling/slapbackish sounds

When the delay is long (aqua light), it goes from doubling/slapback to 2 seconds of delay

There is a pushbutton in the top left corner. When it’s pressed, the delay time is controlled by expression pedal when the delay is long; this control is not available for the short delay

Rise time and fall time pertain both to the expression pedal but also the different effects that can be achieved when switching between the short and long delay times. It controls the parameters of a slew limiter, allowing for weird pitch artifacts.

Quality:

Feedback — this controls the feedback of the delay

In the top left corner is an “input gain” control: the diffusers loooove gain, so this allows you to boost the input of the signal to the delay by up to 12dB; there is gain compensation at the output of the delay, so the volume of the patch should stay steady as it’s adjust; it just affects the “sound” of the patch

Grime content — this is the biggie, what the whole delay side of the patch revolves around; it controls the sampling rate and modulation of the diffusers, and it covers a wide range of interactions between the two.

It is not an intensity control; there is no off. The least aggressive sounds are found at the top of the rotation. The most intense sounds are right around .5. The diffusers… are weird, and this patch always sounds a little different whenever I use it. They respond to low frequencies different than high frequencies, and they are dynamic. It’s a really cool sound to play around with. Try different settings.

Tone — controls a low-pass filter, very useful for shaping the sound, but also for manipulating the feedback; as it is part of the same feedback path as the diffusers, there is some interaction between the two

Resonance — controls the resonance of the filter. The resonance is not super aggressive, because super aggressive resonance in a feedback loop leads to…. awful things. But at certain settings… it can still get out of hand. That’s in purpose. There is some interaction between the feedback control and the resonance control, such that as resonance is pushed up, feedback is pushed down.

Modulation:

Pretty simple stuff; rate and depth should be familiar; when pushed to its max, the feedback can produce some interesting FM-ish sounds, as the LFOs are juuuuust at the lower threshold of audio rate

Modulating delay lines is…. messy. (If you want it to be less messy, consider supporting the “Linearity Curves” proposal on the ZOIA ideas forum.) I’ve tried to make it sound as good as I can, given the limitations, but there are definitely moments where it sounds… wrong.

There are UI buttons to determine the modulation shape: sine, triangle, square, ramp, sawtooth

There is also a pushbutton to intervert the modulation between the left and right side; this can produce a more “lush” stereo image

“Global” controls

There’s the mix; this is old hat; it behaves how you expect

There are also two pushbuttons:

Grime or Space 1 and Grime or Space 2

These change the parameters of the diffusers. When they are off, or in “Grime” mode, they act as the weird distortions I built this patch around. When they are on, or in “Space” mode, they function as more traditional diffusers, smearing the delays and creating pseudo multi-tap and reverb sounds.

When they are in “Space” mode, the “Grime Content” control described above is inoperative. It has no effect.

Each of the diffusers also has subtly different “Space” settings; the order matters some too.

The point of this is that the patch can be a grimy delay, or a grimy delay/verb, or a lo-fi verb, all with a push of a (couple) button(s)

Sound clip:

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