tools of the trade, part 4: things that stutter, episode 1: the prequel

according to the dictionary of shut-your-face written by me, stuttering is the effect whereby a piece of audio is repeated numerous times in a row. the piece of audio is often short (far less than or around a couple seconds) and is often repeated in a rhythm that fits with the tempo of the song. this effect is everywhere. djs do it, electronic musicians in lots of genres do it, and apparently paul hardcastle did in in a totally slammin' 80s song about the vietnam war.

stuttering is probably most often used on vocals and drums, but it works well on anything, especially instruments with a natural fade out like piano or guitar. despite the fact that trombone doesn't have a natural fade out like this, stuttering its sound still produces interesting results (listen to the example below).

there are tons of plugins these days, many of them free, that chop up audio, glitch it out, stutter it, etc. many of these plugins fall into the fsu category. even plugins not originally made to stutter can be made to stutter. a delay set to a short delay time with the feedback at 100% will stutter if you feed it short sounds and are careful to shut off it's input while it's stuttering so you don't blow up your shitty apartment with feedback through your shitty speakers. as i think i've mentioned before, audio damage's dubstation does this well with its "loop" button.

anyway, the plugin i used to make the example below is called "stretch," and it's by a guy who calls himself "dblue." he's the author of perhaps one of the best known fsu plugins in the vst world, simply called "glitch." glitch does indeed kick ass in its own right, but sometimes it's more than you need, so dblue has released a couple of its features as individual plugins. stretch is one of them. it was originally designed to be a glitchy time shifter, but it has a hold feature, which makes it great for stuttering stuff. like i said, there are lots of plugins that stutter, but i think stretch's simplicity and lack of parameters make it one of the easiest to use to get some basic stuttering happening.