Spook Out Those Harmonics.

Spectral Disturbtion is a Multiband Chebyshev Polynomial Distortion Effect.

What Does That Mean?

Distortion is all about adding harmonics to your sound – thats what gives it bite. Most distortions add odd and/or even harmonics to a signal, but with Chebyshev Polynomials, you can choose specific harmonics – resulting in some super unique, interesting, and weird sounds that can exist somewhere between distortion and pitch shifting (check out this video of what happens to a pure sine tone).

Chebyshevs are complex formulas, but you don’t need to understand it at all to use Spectral Disturbtion – the interface is intuitive, musical, and easy to use. It centers around an XY pad to ‘perform’ polynomials 1 thru 9 – its expressive and fun to play! Because its multiband, you can choose different harmonics and different distortion amounts for the bass, mids, and high frequencies. Its capable of some brutal noise, old radio crunch, and can even add weird harmonies to your sound. To make things even more interesting, its got SLOO to slow down parameter changes, and BOO, which tangles up the internal routing – making it a little more unpredictable – and way more fun to play!

How It Works

Take a look at the MANUAL

Spectral Disturbtion starts by dividing up your sound into 3 frequency bands. Each band is saturated and then put through a Chebyshev Polynomial shaper. The polynomial number its shaped through is controlled via the central XY pad – just drag the corresponding emoji around to perform it.

The Chebyshev’ed signals are then combined back together and saturated one last time before being run through hi and lo pass filters.

There’s a SLOO knob, which adds a slew to almost every knob and XY parameter on the plugin. This is essentially a ‘time shmear’ – meaning it slows parameter changes down: move a knob, and if the SLOO is high, it can take a full 30 seconds to shmear from point A to B. This is a very powerful performance function, particularly with drones or gestural music.

Then of course, theres BOO. The BOO knob tangles up the internal wires… The multibands send the wrong signals to different Chebyshev shapers. I’m not going to explain what this does exactly – but this knob adds a little chaos and a lot of stereo to your sound!

Tutorial Video

Sound Demo Videos

Spooky Pitch Shifting

Specifications:

Faded Plugins are all 64 bit and run as a VST on Windows and an Audio Unit (AU) on Mac.
There is no Mac VST at this point.

Faded Plugins should run on all versions of Windows, and are tested to work on all recent versions of Mac OS.

Faded Plugins are not M1 native (yet!).

MAC USERS! Apple makes it difficult for developers who don’t pay a yearly “Apple Tax”. We disagree with this policy and don’t pay into this system… Which means that there are a few extra steps for installation. Check out this video showing how to place the installation files. There is one ‘authorization’ step after this – instructions in the included PDF.

Our plugins are tested on a few DAWs, but not all! Please get in touch if there are any issues.

Windows users may need some common support files called the “Visual C++ Redistributable Package”. Odds are you already have it, but just in case you don’t you can download them here.