Hey! Maybe you need a circuit bent reverb? (plus free IRs and samples)

Hello, Oscillator Sink here. There's an aesthetic trend in modern effects, especially in ambient effects like reverb and delay, which points towards embracing and accentuating digital imperfection. It turns out that the glitching, aliasing, distortion, and noise that engineers traditionally work so hard to dial out of gear actually sounds pretty amazing when used creatively and intentionally. Companies like Chase Bliss, Strymon, and Hologram, among many others, have really embraced this way of working, adding controls to their effects which allow musicians to digitally degrade the sound in wonderful ways, intentionally circuit bending their instruments by design. Another way though to achieve these sounds might be to buy an old cheap reverb from eBay and circuit bend it, either doing it yourself or in my case paying someone who knows what they're doing to do it. This electronic abuse forces the unit into leaning into these artifacts, whether it wants to or not. The results may be more chaotic, but they might also be even more fun and potentially more affordable. So, in this video, I'm going to show you one of my circuit bent reverbs in a few different guises. And if you like the sounds, I've put a pack of impulse responses and samples up on my Gumroad for pay what you want, which includes free. There's a link in the description, but I'll talk more about those at the end of the video. So, this is my circuit bent Yamaha R100 reverb processor. Instantly, if you want to look for one of these on eBay or the like, uh make sure you definitely call it a reverb processor, R100 reverb, uh because it's Yamaha, which means there's also a motorbike and I think a hi-fi unit also called an R100. Cuz that's Yamaha for you. Uh so, this one was modified by Circuitbenders UK here in the UK. This is not a sponsored video. I paid for the modification and I bought a number of other bits and pieces from them in the past, including my Heat Echo Echo pedal, which I love very, very dearly. Uh so, I can vouch for them, but uh if you are not in the UK, then obviously look for an independent circuit bender operating in your region. This has got three mods on it essentially, and uh I thought we'd start with something fairly basic, just sort of running it as a send on the mixer with the uh MicroFreak here doing just a little bit of arpeggiating. Um so, modifications we've got. So, the first one here is a reclock, and what this does is it reclocks the processor. As we turn this down, it's literally going to slow down the calculations happening inside the unit, which is going to make things longer and also reduce the sample rate. And then any sort of artifacts that are inside there are also going to become more prominent as we can hear them they're not being hidden by the speed. So, bring it down here. Oh, and it pitch bends as you do it. You can hear that the reverb's got longer. This was just like an early reflections thing to begin with. And you can start to hear some of that sort of glistening sample reduction. Now, we can push this much further, obviously. More obvious sort of glistening artifacts, more sort of resonant ringing. And as we bring it down, sort of here, that beautiful sort of glistening. Now, the other thing that's going to happen as we turn this down, this is an unfortunate side effect of abusing the instrument essentially, abusing the unit, is that we're going to start hearing the clock whine. Um so, you can hear a pitch. There we go. You might have heard it earlier if your ears are better than mine. You can kind of hear this fixed pitch that's sort of happening in the background there. So, usually that's resonance, that ringing, that clock noise going to be hidden by the the filter on the output, but because we have brought the processor's clock down, we've also brought that whine down, and we're starting to hear it as a discrete pitch. It's a unfortunate side effect of doing any sort of re-clocking in most cases. You will get this sort of clock whine. I get that much more noise on this unit. Um what I've been doing when I've been using this is I've um in post, I've put some very, very thin notch filters where I can see the resonance very clearly on an analyzer. Or you can use something like the iZotope um RX de-hum, I think it is, which will also pick out the other um harmonics higher up, which is useful. What I'll do in this case, I'll just drop the treble a little bit on the mixer just to hide it a bit. We can take it much, much lower. You can see they're only at not even at 12:00 here, so let's take it down. Got it really Drop the treble a bit on the output to hide that whine a bit more. But it's this beautiful, glistening crunchy ambience that sits across the whole thing. Bear in mind that that's the actual length of the reverb as far as the unit is concerned. It's only because we've dropped the clock so far that we're getting That's just beautiful. Again, clock whine is probably needs notching out in reality. That lovely ambient wash. Let's drop it all the way down and see what happens. So it's going to take so long us to get back up to pitch cuz just this glitchy wonderful glacial wash. So, the next modification that's in here is this RAM write pair. And what this will do is take what is in the audio RAM and just loop it, obviously. Um what's interesting is that what's in the RAM is not in order necessarily, but let's give it a go. Let's just stop that. So, I've turned off here. We've actually happened to more or less get exactly at the right time by which is amazing. That's purely by chance. Now we have something in the RAM we can also drop it down. This is beautiful digital mess. Processor is running so slow. Let's There's something quite beautiful about that I'm to my ears anyway. That clock wind is still very much there. But I can sort of ignore it when you get the stuff so Plus we can go faster as well. So that's how fast it should be. And we can release it. Cool. The final mod that I have on this device is this glitching matrix up at the top here. Essentially, each of these switches is a point on the circuit and when we turn on two of the switches, then we connect together two points on the circuit which are not usually meant to meet. This is kind of a classic circuit bending approach. Um Now, warning before we get into this, a lot of these are going to induce feedback. Sometimes it comes on pretty quickly. I will drop it down in post where it can, but there might be loud noises going forward. So it's top row here. Kind of does these tonal things. Sort of ring mod things. And as you sort of go up in pitch with the input, you get more aliasing. And different combinations do different things. This last one is the danger one. Sometimes feedback. Yeah. Ooh. Kind of safe there. It's going to feedback though. Um this next one tends to be sort of like these very, very fast wave shapey, distortiony type things. Sometimes they sound sort of like very fast tremolo. These ones really do like to feedback. Let's see if we can find a safe one. Of course, we can combine them with throw No. Throw above. Danger. Let's see if we can find a combination that's not going to immediately feedback. You all want to feedback today. Um with whether these feedbacks is also going to depend what the settings and the patch on the device are. Um Let's all try it with the next row down, which is kind of these rhythmic things generally. Let's drop the clock. So, these rhythms are being like derived from some part of the circuit. So, the reclock knob is going to have an effect on them. I can find one from the top row that's going to immediately feedback. You all want to do it today. Okay. I can I get these sort of swooping in. Bring one things. That's what these rhythms are in it. The reclock knob is going to change the tempo of the rhythm. I can get one of these from the row above not to immediately feedback, that'd be great cuz some of these sound really good. Like really What's coming? Really uh threatening. This bottom one is sort of more sort of crunchy distortion things going on. Let's turn up the reverb a little bit. That is really beautiful textures. And again, we can try to bring in some of the other ones and hope that it doesn't go completely mad. That sounds sort of safe. Right. It's not going to feedback anything. Just this little ringing feedback. Use it as a drone against the tonic of the song. And of course, this will also interact with the RAM loop. >> Now we can start glitching what's in the loop. This is a lot safer cuz it can't have a feedback cuz it's locked inside the loop. And so once you get like these almost like poly metric loops happening. Yeah. So I followed up my multi cast here because I think one place where this really shines is when it comes to processing beats. Um this time I am running directly into the R100 rather than having it on a send on the mixer. And the reason for doing that is to demonstrate that even in bypass mode as we are at the moment, uh everything is going through the DSP. So in bypass mode, if we reclock, we get hardware bit crushing. I think it's sick. None of this fake plugin bit crushing. Real hardware bit crushing. This is this sort of digital version of analog snobbery, I think. Do you have plug-in ears? But of course we can disengage the bypass and start doing stuff with this well. Let's set the pre-delay to quite short. Yeah, cool. Let's glitch some things. We still have the wet dry control on here as well. So, if we want to dial some of this down a bit, we can. Yeah. That is resonance is picking up with the different re-clock positions. Pretty cool. Also, the stereo offset gets wider as we lower the sample rate. So, start getting these sort of different comb filtering things. Let's try it. I'm really deep resonance. Even without anything but some production. It's kind of weird that. Let's try something like that. Just dropping that sample rate, enhancing that low end. Mhm. Let's try the bomb right. Not that one. That one's dangerous usually. Let's try a different uh, preset here. Uh Maybe small club. Let's drop that. That lovely. Okay. It's still quite performable, so you find like a punching effect almost that you like sound of. I think we've glitched out the, uh, the reverb. We've kind of saturated it. So, we're just sort of playing with the beat now. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. It's sick for processing gates. Yeah. If you wouldn't mind terribly just for a moment, I'm going to get weird with these cyber ether. >> lush. One thing I've really been enjoying with the R-100 is actually using it to sort of coax sounds without any input. Pretty much in the same tradition as sort of no input mixer feedback patches. In this patch right here, we are joining together parts of the circuit and creating feedback loops that shouldn't otherwise exist. And some of the tones and rhythms that we start to find are really really cool. Especially if you're into like industrial sort of like hard techno samples. Sometimes it goes quiet. Coax it back to life. There you go. And just flipping a switch gives you a whole different variation on it. Especially with this row here. Yeah. And of course we can catch something in the ramble. Which could be quite different to what we were hearing. >> I'm up my I'm up my No, saltines. Sit up. Look at it. It instinctively knows how to attack her, right? >> Well done. You can rest now. As I mentioned at the start of the video, I've made a bunch of samples and impulse responses from the circuit bent R-100 and put them up on my Gumroad. They are priced as pay what you want, which includes free. So, if you just want to grab them, then by all means. But, if you want to support the channel, then as I don't have a Patreon or do sponsorships, buying sample packs, patch packs, and music is the best way to do it. There are 51 samples in the pack, including a number of loops, and they were all captured using the no-input techniques I was showing earlier in the video. I've gone through and cleaned up the clock line on everything, made sure the loops do actually loop neatly, and made sure that the tuned samples are concert pitch, so they should be good to go on whatever hardware or software you choose to use. In case you haven't guessed, you are hearing the samples right now. I think here they have a cool mid-90s 16-bit console vibe. But, the loops in particular can go pretty hard in a techno setting, for example. On the impulse response side of things, I saved a bunch of patches, 25 in fact, on the reverb that we've been seeing in this video, and I took impulse responses of those patches. For those of you who are interested in the technical details, I found that doing a sine sweep tended to blur or even remove a lot of the glitchy artifacts that are what we're after really here. So, I ended up using short noise bursts instead. That gave me a much better, more consistent result. Um Also, I've gone through and I've removed stuff like clock wine, so we don't have this constant resonance in these reverbs to make them more generally usable. But, I've left other sort of distortions and as you can hear sort of glitchy artifacts. I'll also mention that um convolution or um impulse responses at least aren't able to properly reproduce a dynamic system and the weird stuff that goes on on the reverb is a dynamic system. So, although we're getting a lot of the vibe, especially with those sort of be repeat-y type things, it's not going to be quite the same thing as the original unit, but I'll talk about something we can do to make it a bit closer. Uh let's just uh go through a couple of these different reverbs. Yeah, some of them are sort of quite dark, which is kind of a result of the sample rate reduction on the unit itself. This lovely sort of rhythmic delay and reverb things in there. Let's try another one. Yeah, on some of the patches I turned on the RAM loop while I was taking the impulse response, which I think this is one of those. So, we got that kind of nice sort of ringing to the repeats. Let's turn it on. And that was the reverse delay maybe with a bunch of other stuff patched. Some down at the bottom of that reverb as well. Let's try this one here. Yeah, those sorts of hard but smeared repeats. That would have been a really low sample rate probably. Uh, let's try one more. That's a really cool dark thing. Yeah, that's lovely. 23, can recommend. So, one thing that you can notice here is that the convolution hasn't kind of got that bit reduced sample rate reduced vibe. It's just kind of reducing it to more of a mellowness instead. So, if you want to try and get close to that vibe, you can always stick some kind of bit crusher or sample rate reducer after the reverb. So, here I've got two AirWindows um plugins that I really like for this job. Bit Glitter here. This is more of a bit rate reducer. I am just a fan of sticking bit rate reducers after reverbs in general. Yeah. And the other one we've got here is Dires, which is also really fantastic sounding sort of submarine user. A lot more subtle. For my money, I think that Bit Crusher itself sounds more like the unit, but I really like the way this sounds in general. Let's take them together, why not? Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you enjoy these samples and inbox responses. Uh as always, a like on the video is massively appreciated. Subscribe, all that good thing. Hit the bell. Got some really cool bits coming up on the channel soon. Uh some stuff from Super Booth, for example, that I'm really excited to share with you. But, um I think we'll leave it there otherwise. So, um until next time. Take care. Bye-bye.