AvailableEffect

Crush

Bit reduction and sample-rate reduction for digital grit.

@maru shared this effect so you can play it in your DAW, remix it or put it on your site.

Play

A stage of OSC-1. It works the same on its own page as it does in the chain, same parameters, same paths.

What it does

A bitcrusher for digital grit, from a faint hiss to a signal reduced to a square wave of itself. Two knobs: how coarse, and how much.

The idea

Crush rounds every sample to a small number of levels. The distortion is the rounding error, which is why it sounds granular and digital rather than warm. The sample rate is also held down at a fixed 12 kHz, so there is no separate rate control; Bits is the knob that decides the character.

The scale is not linear. Twelve bits is a hiss you notice on quiet tails, eight is unmistakably digital, four is the classic crunch, and two or one stop being a texture on the source and start replacing it.

Guide and controls

How it works.

Quantises each sample to 2^Bits levels and mixes the result against the dry signal. The distortion is the quantisation error, which is why it sounds granular rather than warm - it is not a saturation curve, it is arithmetic being deliberately careless.

There is no rate decimation in the preview build; Bits is the only crushing axis here. The published schema keeps the name so the eventual kernel drops in without renaming anything.

What would you make with Crush?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Goes well with.

Prototype

OSC-1

A complete synth built from separate modules.

Building block

Drive

Add harmonics with a waveshaper.

Prototype

FX Mini

Drive, tone, and bounded feedback delay.

Prototype

Amp Rig

Tube-style drive into a real cabinet.