Best FREE glitch VSTs to spice up your productions
3 min readWhile most of the production process focusses on getting the cleanest and most natural sounds, adding glitch effects can be a great way to stray from the norm. I have made you a list of my top free glitch effect VSTs for you to check out yourself.
Perhaps the most well-known, and most loved Glitch plugin, this is the older version of a paid product – Glitch 2. Offering many of the features in the full-priced version, Glitch 1 is a great tool to add variety to your mix.
Whether you want to chop and disassemble the sounds you’ve recorded or add a computery layer of electronic glitch to a beat, this plugin has plenty of scope. A great trick with Glitch is to have it on random and record several playthroughs. This means you can pick the best sounding parts, or even resample them through Glitch for a second time.
I have even ran vocals through it and turned them into effected percussion loops, just from choosing the right glitch effects within. It makes for an awesome effect in a song where over the course of several bars the listener realises you are morphing vocals into a beat.
A glitch effect that can really spice up your sounds by adding glitchy articulations and abstract textures. It works really great on drums and comes packed with some amazing presets which will come as a relief, since the interface sacrifices making immediate sense for looking so damn cool.
You will find however, that after playing with each control in turn, it isn’t actually as hard as it looks. Be wary though, it has such a broad range of sound, it can be quite hard to replicate previous ideas so make sure you save your own presets too!
Krush - by Tritik
Tritik have made an outstanding free Bitcrusher effect which provides way more than it’s competitors do. It has seen numerous uses since I’ve downloaded it and I highly recommend it to everyone.
Perhaps one of the best uses of bitcrushers is brightness. Sometimes you can actually add a lot of bright sparkle to a sound by very cautiously applying some gentle bitcrushing. In the same way you wouldn’t default to cranking a distortion or saturation effect, try adding a shimmer to your audio with small touches of bitcrushed signal mixed in with the dry signal. To read more about the best creative uses of a bitcrusher, check out our guide.
By the same people that brought us Fracture, here is another gem. Hysteresis is a tool that will really mess up your sound – in a good way. Much like with Fracture, you are getting a great selection of presets with it. Unlike Fracture, this is much easier to use and understand. The controls are laid out and labelled making it clear what each section does.
You don’t so much control this plugin, its more like providing it with a seed for it to go its own way. Instead of the traditional controls, it invites you to type words in which control the plugin’s internal calculations. The creativity is taken right out of your hands and replaced with artistic maths that you cannot predict. Because of this, it’s hard to even describe the sound this makes, because there’s a low chance that people will end up with the same outcome.
You can type in whatever you fancy, and be sure to take note of what works because not everything does. Kudos if you can make a killer preset from all the rude words.
