Well, I am fully in the mad-scientist phase of plugin development. All sorts of hairbrained schemes are under way. No rules apply. Fun reigns.

If you’re a steadfast newsletter reader, you may remember that a couple of issues ago I speculated about running the Fermenter modulation section at audio-rate. Well um… I may have gotten a bit carried away with that idea. I don’t want to give away too much yet, because I’m not sure if this will turn into a fully-fledged plugin, but for now it’s all about stable feedback: systems of waves that are constantly twisting and morphing into each other like curious creatures.

Here are some things it can do:

(feat. a cute little oscilloscope model I’ve been working on!)

At its heart, there are two oscillators whose frequency, amplitude, etc. can be controlled by some knobs (you’ve seen this before). But the cool thing is that you can use either oscillator to modulate any of these knobs at audio rate.

So like, when the wave wiggles a certain way, the connected knob wiggles right along with it REALLY fast.

This is very exciting if you’re the kind of person who likes to f*ck sh*t up. You might already be able to guess that it’s quite easy to create all kinds of insanity feedback loops. The nice thing is that they are always stable (ie. won’t puncture your eardrums). No guarantees they’ll sound predictable though.

Oh! I also put a sampler in there, so instead of a sine wave, you can put, say, a bassoon into your crazy feedback loop.

I’ve always loved FM (frequency-modulation) synthesizers like the DX7. This is like that but more. Like those synthesizers, the one downside is that it’s kind of fiddly, so the presets would have to be really thoughtful.

And there are other things I’m not mentioning. For example, I’m working on a voice allocator that can make the notes you play sound more or less consonant or dissonant with each other in realtime (!!!) Stay tuned.

Can you tell I’m having fun? That said, this is all still a very early-stage prototype, so who knows if it will make the cut as a bona-fide Nudist Audio™ plugin.1

More experiments to come!

Cheers,
Caleb

It’s a short newsletter this month! I’m off on an artist retreat, focused on writing music for this stretch. If you ever get the chance to to this, I’d really recommend it. Creativity thrives with new places, uninterrupted chunks of time, and a bit of boredom (and, of course, Nudist Audio™ plugins).

I’ve been having ideas for new plugins at a breakneck pace. It remains to be seen if any of them are good ideas.

Two little updates to tickle your fancy:

1. The new free update to Fermenter is out - including a randomizer button, which, to be honest, is really fun. I can’t believe I didn’t put it in from the start.

2. I’ve also published a user manual for Fermenter! It goes into more detail on how it works and gives you some ideas for how to use it creatively.

Instead of your usual plugin recommendation, I will leave you with a plugin gripe: does anyone know why so many emulations of classic analog synths are… lame?

I’ve been playing a physical DX-7 and a Moog a lot recently, and wow - they’re truly so much more fun than any of the emulations I’ve used. Part of it is probably just that pressing buttons is more fun than clicking a mouse. But I actually think most of it is the presets.

It feels like whenever I open an emulation, nearly all of the presets are ridiculously complicated to the point of being unusable. Every single modulator and envelope is on, four effects are applied, there’s a giant reverb tail, and the result sounds like something you could only use in a cheesy Star Trek reboot. It’s like they were trying to demo all the features of their fancy new effects engine, and forgot that they actually have to sound good.

Am I the only one who feels this way? Am I just using the wrong plugins? Does anyone have solutions? Please! Let me know in the comments.

Hope your month is filled with excellent presets and a bit of productive boredom.

Cheers,
Caleb

We back! And what a month it’s been for me! With the Fermenter release there’s been so much to do - updating the website, fixing bugs on bugs, all those new plugin ideas that I need to get sidetracked by, etc.

I’m also working on an update to Fermenter, which includes some oft-requested features and a super-secret new button (you may have much randomness to look forward to). Coming soon to theaters near you!

I’m spending the summer at my dear brother’s music studio in Vermont, land of good cheese and anarchist bookstores and actual nudist colonies. Wish you were here!1

Ok, story time. This month I made a hilarious discovery.

I found a bug in Fermenter. Usually that’s a bad thing and, for me, means hours of banging my head on various tables. But not only does this bug not break anything - miraculously, it actually enables you to do some extra stuff, and that stuff happens to be beautiful stuff. What??

Let me explain. I wanted it to be so that every single thing in Fermenter is modulateable. But not literally everything can be modulateable: for obvious reasons, you can’t modulate the “save preset” button, or the preset bar in general, or the modulator waveform type dropdown menu.

Or so I thought.

As it turns out, uh, you actually can modulate the modulator waveform type dropdown menu. I had meant to mark those as not-modulateable, but I accidentally marked them as yes-modulateable. Oops.

Here’s an example. This sine wave is modulating its own type. So, literally, when the value of the sine wave goes up, the type increments by one, turning it into a triangle wave briefly, and then the triangle wave goes back down and it turns back into a sine wave.

It’s hard to describe how CRAZY it is that this even works.

There’s a reason I didn’t intend for this to be possible. Think about it: if the sine wave goes up and turns into a square wave, it could jump discontinuously somewhere else, and instantly turn into a different type of wave, and then jump discontinuously somewhere else…

But if you tune this right, you can actually get some really cool shapes!

I don’t know about you, but I think it is both hilarious and awesome that you can do this. So I’m going to leave it in as an Easter egg for the curious :).

To do this yourself, you’ll have to view the internal plugin parameters - it’s not visible directly in the plugin GUI.2 Every DAW has its own way of displaying these. The relevant parameters are called:

• “MOD_0/1_TYPE modulator id” - this controls which modulator is being applied to the “type” parameter.

• “mod to MOD_0/1_TYPE” - this controls how much modulation is applied.

While exploring this, I had a thought: what if you did this at audio rate? What would that sound like? No idea. But I’m going to try! I think this is representative of how I like to come up with new algorithm ideas. I’m often inspired by something in the realm of math, often something visual. Then it’s just one step of extrapolation: “how could you turn that into a sound?”

And now for your sometimes-monthly underground plugin recommendation: you should try Ewan Bristow’s Anina, which is a free plugin that takes the idea of spectral resonance suppression (like Soothe) to a creative and ridiculous extreme. Rather than the goal being to smooth out imperfections, Anina pushes the algorithm to the max to totally discombobulate input sounds. It really leans into the weird artefacts of these tools, in a way that’s very up my alley, and might be up yours too.

Here’s to your team winning the world cup this month!

Cheers,
Caleb

It’s been a big week for me! In case you missed it, the new plugin I’ve been working on for 2 years just came out last week :D

It’s called Fermenter, and it’s a strange new kind of timbral shifter. An all-round living tone dimension explorer.

In my spare time I’m actually a fermentation enthusiast! A bit addicted to kimchi, saurkraut, kombucha, pickled radishes, etc. So the name felt close to home, and also kind of a good description of what it sounds like.

I have been so, so grateful for the incredible reaction to this plugin. You guys are seriously awesome. People are already making some beautiful + weird music with it - keep sending it to me! And thank you to all you newsletter readers for being on my team.

If you haven’t heard it yet, here’s a little taste of what it can do.

piano, toggling between dry/wet:

guitar, modulating the timbre over time:

Ok so: a lot of people have been asking me how Fermenter works. Which is understandable; it sounds pretty strange, and like it might be doing something spectral, but it also has zero latency. And is it really a new algorithm?

So here I’m going to endeavor to explain it to anyone interested!

HOW FERMENTER WORKS

I couldn’t figure out how to write this succinctly. So,

TLDR: Fermenter works by breaking down down audio into thousands of tiny chunks, and then reassembling them in a slightly different way. The specific way that it reassembles them is what makes that timbre-shifting sound, and also makes it sound kinda funky and messed-up :D.

Ok, now for the slightly more detailed explanation.

Fermenter can sound like a formant shifter in some cases, but under the hood, it doesn’t work like other formant shifters. It’s actually closer to a grain resampler.

What do I mean by that? If you’ve ever used a grain resampler or grain synthesizer, you know that it basically splits audio into a bunch of little chunks, and then plays them back at different delays, pitches, gains, etc. You might have ~20 grains playing at a given time. The cacophony of all of these bits of audio playing at once is what makes that cool cloudy sound.

Now imagine you create a new grain every single sample. That’s 48,000 times per second. This is entering a strange temporal regime: not control-rate or audio-rate but sample-rate, the very finest time scale at which audio is rendered by a computer.

To understand this, let’s take the simplest case - that these grains have zero delay, zero pitch shift, zero gain change. They’re all exactly the same as the original sound.

What would this sound like? Well, think about it. Since they have zero delay, all 48,000 grains are playing the audio at the current moment, with no modifications. That means we’re just layering the current audio sample on top of itself 48,000 times, or in other words, turning up the audio by about 94 decibels.

Ok… so that’s a VERY big gain boost, but otherwise not so interesting.

Now imagine that each grain is pitched down by, say, 12 semitones. We play them all at half-speed, but still play one every sample. What would that sound like?

For reasons that I don’t have time to fully get into, this actually sounds like an extreme lowpass filter, and not a pitch-shift. With normal, low-ish numbers of grains like 5 or 20, we would still be able to hear those individual pitched-down pieces (this is sort of how some pitch shifters work). But when we’re playing 48,000 pitched-down grains at once, they start to all blend together into, as it happens, a lowpass filter!

That’s the magic of doing things at sample-rate: effects can transform in unexpected ways.

But here’s the crazy thing: when you then very slightly deviate the characteristics of these grains from one another - for example, their pitch - by a minuscule amount, all of a sudden, a wholly new and distinct sound pops out of the muck.

Why? Because the grains start to have interaction effects. In other words, when you play a whole lot of similar-but-slightly-different pieces of audio on top of each other, the result can sound distinct in a complicated and hard-to-predict way, depending on how those individual pieces relate to each other.

This new sound can be a lot of things, depending on exactly how these grains are different from each other. For example, if this deviation is at a normal, slow speed, this starts to sound kinda like a chorus!

But I’m not interested in normal things. I’m interested in weird things. So what I did is deviated the parameters using the incoming audio wave itself.

In other words, when the incoming audio wave goes up, the pitch of the grains goes up by just a tiny bit. And then when it goes back down, the grains’ pitch goes back down.

So now, all the grains have roughly the same pitch (in our case, -12 semitones, but the “timbre” slider controls this pitch), but are slightly deviated from each other using the pattern of the incoming audio wave. High-frequency inputs will create high-frequency deviations, and vice versa. A spiky transient on the input will create a quick jump in some of the grains’ pitches.

I found that when I did this, the new sound was a version of the incoming audio whose timbre or “formants” had been shifted, but whose fundamental pitch remained the same.1 I had no idea that this is what would happen before I did it - it was just a pure experimental accident.

And it also did… weird papery sonic stuff, that’s hard to describe… especially to polyphonic sounds. At this point, I knew I was on to something cool.

Still, there was a lot of muck surrounding the cool sound. So most of the work of building the plugin was figuring out how to get rid of that muck and just isolate the core “interaction effect” sound that came from deviating these parameters at sample rate.

Fermenter has a LOT of pre- and post-processing before and after this main grain thing. And I mean a lot. My final signal-flow diagram for this plugin has seventeen processes, and many of these are composed of multiple sub-processes. They’re specially-designed filters, compressors, band-splitters, envelope matchers, and other fun things, all with precisely-tuned parameters to make this weirdo core grain thing sound as good as possible.

This got complicated, fast. Which is why it took almost 2 years to make, and which is also why I’m pretty sure no one has ever done this before (and probably would have a hard time replicating it from just this description).2

But for the original, core sound, I had no idea what it would sound like before I heard it. This one was blindly discovered. And I think that’s just the coolest thing in the world! You can just have a math idea and ask “huh, what would it sound like if I did that?” And sometimes, it actually sounds good.

There are some interesting things about this algorithm. For example, even at zero pitch-shift (the “timbre” slider set to 0), we’re still deviating the characteristics of all these grains. So, unlike most formant shifters, Fermenter actually still does stuff.

I often like this zero-timbre mode the best. It can sound like a weird lofi filter-y thing, or a noisy gate-y thing, or even a distortion (try type “C”). I also really like when you set the timbre ever so slightly away from zero, like 0.1 or 0.2 semitones.

And then there’s the strangest knob of all - the “contort” knob, which adds a sine wave at a specified frequency to the deviation thing I described above. But depending on whether this sine wave is at control-rate or audio rate, and depending on what parameter of the grains we’re deviating (the “type” selector), and depending on how much of the normal deviation is going on (the “amount” knob), it can sound like several totally different effects. It’s my favorite knob in the plugin.

As you can maybe tell, this entire technical explanation gives pretty much zero insight into how to actually use Fermenter in music, or predict what it will sound like when you turn a specific knob.

You just have to trust your ears! Turn the knobs, and listen to what comes out and how the sound changes, and react to that however you will.

Hoping your gut is full of fermented foods and sounds this month.

Cheers,
Caleb

The day is finally here - the new plugin, Fermenter, is OUT now on all streaming services, I mean um, my website! You can find it here.

I’m proud of this one; it’s a really cool new sound. At its heart is an algorithm unlike any that I know of in another audio effect - in short, it’s a unique way to alter the tone and timbre of a sound. Not a formant shifter, not a pitch shifter, not an EQ, but something new :D.

I’ve been using it a ton in my own music since I started making it! (always a good sign) I’ve found it’s best when I want to take something out of its familiar sonic palette and put it in a different world - to keep it recognizably the same instrument, but make it sound somehow “other.”

I’m planning on doing a longer post soon explaining roughly how it works, for those interested (and as best I can without writing 4,000 words). Until then, happy fermenting!

Cheers,
Caleb

p.s. My brother and I got to film a little demo video last week, playing with Fermenter on all sorts of instruments (which was so fun to make). You can check that out here!

Huge announcement!! The new plugin will officially be released on May 4th. It’s called Fermenter, and it’s a very (very) strange new kind of timbral shifter. I’ve been working on it for almost two years, and I’m really freaking excited about it.

To celebrate, I’m giving away 10 free copies to you newsletter folks! Thanks a ton for being on my team this whole time, and for some reason interested in what I have to say :).

Click here to enter the raffle—you just have to enter your email, and I’ll select 10 randomly from the list to send a free copy on release day.

(this month, I discovered that it can also be a weird chorus…?)

See you on May 4th, and happy fermenting!

Cheers,
Caleb

It’s shaping up to be an exciting month here in Nudist-Audio-land! It’s looking like the new timbral-shifting plugin will be released in early May.

Just when I thought I was done with the plugin, I came up with another very strange distortion algorithm (why does this keep happening? 😭). I’m putting it in a little knob off to the corner in the “weirdo knobs” section. Here’s a taste of what that sounds like:

conga drums dry/wet, playing around with the plugin parameters:

electric guitar:

Fun updates from this month:

• We tabled at a small music festival in LA! Got to show off the oscilloscope and demo the new plugin :).

• Check out this beautiful composition by James Sindo, feat. Nudistort hooked up to a glove with a bunch of sensors!

I found a ridiculous and fascinating claim I must respond to. My brother recently sent me this Instagram reel, which claims that all audio effects are just “either gain, delay, or both.” I also had a friend recently ask me whether all audio effects are just some form of gain.

I think this is a very common way of thinking about audio that is completely wrong.

Saying all audio effects are just delay and gain is like saying cooking is just reshuffling carbohydrates: it both completely misses the point, and is untrue. So let’s set the record straight!

When stored in a computer, audio is just a big list of numbers. These numbers are all between -1 and +1, and they literally tell the vibrating speaker cone where to go at each point in time.

These numbers are read out, one by one, 48,000 times per second, and the speaker cone traces out the shape they make over time. Magically, this produces music.

This means that anything you can think to do to this list of numbers, to this complicated shape, is an audio effect. Think about that for a second. Literally any way you could think to squish, twist, flip, or do anything else to this shape sounds like something.

You could, say, take all the numbers greater than 0.5 and swap them with each other randomly, or retrace the shape with some other similar shape, or smush all the numbers together. Or anything else you can think of.

“Gain” means multiplying the numbers by a constant value. “Delay” means shifting the numbers left-and-right in time. But there’s so much more than that!

This limited way of thinking - that all you can really do to audio is just a couple simple things - is unfortunately pretty common among musicians. A lot of people feel there’s nothing new under the sun.

I think this is reacting to something real. The truth is that a lot of plugins and pedals do no more than recombine the same dozen standard effects in different ways. It seems like every day, a new plugin is advertised to us which, under the hood, is a multieffect that you could reconstruct in an Ableton rack. It’s understandable to come to the conclusion that it’s all been done before.

But it hasn’t, and not even close.

Wishing you a month full of beautiful twisty shapes composed of large lists of numbers!

Cheers,
Caleb

Mostly unsexy updates here at Nudist Audio HQ for this month! I’m finishing up the new plugin, and there are many logistical things to be done—website backend stuff, endless testing, etc.

I’m really excited to see what you all do with it. If you haven’t guessed, it’s a very strange timbral shaper: sort of like a formant shifter, but it works on any source, not just vocals, and it sounds even weirder.

I thought I’d change it up by showing you some full mixes through the plugin. So here are some songs I love, utterly destroyed:

(The Rolling Stones - Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, and Madvillainy - Money Folder)

In very delighting news, the most recent Nudist Audio business expense has been a handsome old analog oscilloscope. If you’ve never seen one… these things are just insanely, intensely beautiful. Last night I literally stared at it, mesmerized, for multiple hours (no, not on drugs).

Here are some sine waves going through a chorus, into the oscilloscope:

Here, the x-axis is the left channel, and the y-axis is the right channel. So, for a mono signal, it always just looks like a diagonal line (x = y, ie. left channel = right channel). To get more interesting shapes, we have to make it stereo—which is why I have the sine wave going through a chorus here.

This isn’t just an abstract visualizer. You’re literally seeing the sound waves.

Here’s a bass through the oscilloscope (again going through a chorus):

These videos don’t capture the extreme smoothness of the screen. This isn’t digital—it’s a continuous electron beam that shoots at a fluorescent film, snaking and sliding faster than your eyes can keep up.

Just for fun, I put some sine waves through Nudistort and put that through the oscilloscope. Turns out you get some pretty insane-looking things.

I really think more people should be using these for concerts and shows! I can’t be the only one who thinks these are the coolest-looking things in the world. If you’re thinking of trying this out and want advice on how to do it, let me know!

Hope your ears are full of sounds this month.

Cheers,
Caleb

I know what you’re thinking: Huzzah! Another Nudist Audio Newsletter!

Many great and strange noises are being made here at Nudist Audio HQ. The greatest and strangest to be included in an upcoming plugin, some of which you can hear below.

It’s really coming into form. I’m getting into the stage of polishing up all the loose ends—presets, registration, testing, etc. Starting to get excited.

One of the things I’ve been building for this new plugin is a modulation system. In the process, I’ve been rediscovering a really beautiful thing you can do with modulators: self-modulation.

I’ve hardly seen anyone do this, and I think it’s just the coolest thing ever.

Here’s a simple sine wave oscillator:

I wanted to make it so that you could just click-and-drag this graph over to any knob to start modulating that knob. But what happens if you drag the graph to its own frequency knob?

The higher the value gets, the higher the frequency gets—so the faster it wants to go down again, creating a little spike.

But things start to get interesting when you introduce another oscillator. You can modulate one oscillator with another, and vice versa, to create a stable feedback loop.

And it gets really crazy when you modulate multiple parameters of each modulator with themselves and each other. I’ve found that so many of these shapes are interesting and weirdly beautiful. Here’s a guitar going through one of these, where each graph is modulating a different plugin parameter.

But you can also use things that aren’t oscillators. Here’s a sine wave mutually-modulating with the input volume envelope. This does really great things to kick drums.

But why stop there? Why not put an audio resampler in there, or a transient detector, and have them modulate each other?

I’m thinking that every preset of the new plugin will be set to some strange and beautiful self-oscillatory graphs, whether or not they’re actually being used to modulate anything. I want these cool shapes to be used more!

It looks like you can’t self-modulate in most DAWs’ stock oscillators (lame). If anyone knows any exceptions, let me know. But there’s an easy workaround:

1. Create two LFOs

2. Set the second LFO’s amplitude/depth to 0.

3. Map the second LFO’s offset to the first LFO.

Now, the second LFO is an exact copy of the first. You can self-modulate by modulating the first LFO’s parameters with the second. Here’s an example in Ableton.

If anyone does this and finds some beautiful shapes, post them down in the comments! Happy modulating!

Cheers,
Caleb

Just in case you haven’t already heard the good news—the Black Friday sale is in full swing over here at Nudist Audio! Nudistort is fully 50% off ($20) until the end of the day tomorrow, December 2nd.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how visualization can help with creative audio development. Below is a graph I’ve drawn for an algorithm I’m working on. This is not a graph of the input audio, nor the output audio—it’s an internal buffer that’s calculated using some math. The audio you’re hearing is actually the sum of all the points on the graph. Imagine tracing down the vertical line in the middle from top to bottom, and adding up all the horizontal distances to each point, and doing that 48,000 times per second. The input here is an electric bass.

I don’t think this will end up in the final product; I often find visualizers like this hurt more than help musical creativity. But for trying to wrap your head around the things you could do to all those little points, it’s an amazing change of perspective.

You can ask yourself: what would it sound like if it looked a certain way? What if you smushed this picture in some way, or flipped it diagonally, or instead of adding all the points together, did something else?

When you’ve been mulling something over for a long time, it’s easy to get caught in the rut of thinking about it in a very abstract and mathematical language. But when you actually see it, plainly laid out in front of you, your brain goes places it would never have gone otherwise.

And for your monthly plugin recommendation, one of the strangest I’ve ever used is Anukari. This is maybe closer to a video game than an audio plugin; the premise is that you place objects in an infinite 3D world, which then vibrate and interact with each other according to the laws of physics. But you can also tune the parameters to be completely unphysical, which creates some ridiculousness. It’s kind of wacky, but I’ve actually found some of the sounds to be really musical. And it’s also made by a solo indie developer! <3

No newsletter next month for Christmas! I wish you a holiday season full of noises.

Cheers,
Caleb

My update is that plugin development is so fun. I’m in the stage of development right now that feels a bit like sculpture carving—you already have the vision, and now you’re ever so slowly chipping away at bits and pieces of the rock, clearing out the clutter, fixing every problem until there are none left.

But before I go on a tangent!—some audio examples for some of the ideas I came up with this month.

Electric guitar:

Acoustic piano (courtesy of Biloba The Human):

Electric guitar again (dry/wet):

This stage I’m in right now, the stage of stone-chipping, is filled with inscrutable bugs, weeks-long red herrings, many academic papers, and pages and pages of math.

But it’s all worth it when you solve a problem, and it actually makes it sound noticeably cooler and more useable. Or—even better—when you make a change in the code that really surprises you sonically. I had a couple of those this month.

The very best feeling is getting totally lost, forgetting time with no idea what’s going on except that it sounds good.

And for your monthly plugin recommendation—so many great ones came out this month! You should definitely check out Eventide’s new free Temperance Lite plugin, which is a reverb that resonates within (or without) a given scale. It sounds beautiful. I’ve found it most useful on subtle settings where I would otherwise use a normal reverb, but it can also make some totally wacky sounds. As I understand, there is some seriously advanced audio-processing going on under the hood.

Here’s to next month being filled with many more audio adventures!

Cheers,
Caleb

P.S. I’m still looking for a name for this upcoming plugin (the one from the audio samples), so if you have any ideas leave a comment! Good if it’s a pun, even better if it somehow incorporates nudity.

I know you’re starved for your monthly Nudist Audio textual update. Hunger no more!—I have finally returned from a long and fulfilling vacation business trip to deliver to you the most thrilling newsletter yet.

Plugin development was on a brief hiatus, but no longer. C++ code is being written. Sounds are being f*cked up. Here are some good ones.

synth dry/wet into one of the algorithms I’m working on:

electric guitar into the same algorithm on some tamer settings:

I thought I’d celebrate my return by philosophizing a little. I’ve been thinking about audio processing. Specifically, about two big ideas. I’m tempted to even call these the two basic premises of what I’m trying to do:

1. There is a vast landscape of weird and wonderful digital audio algorithms out there that haven’t been discovered.

2. In order to get to something interesting, you have to not know what it’s going to sound like beforehand.

I believe these things because they’ve been proven to me over and over. You make enough silly audio algorithms with nothing but disrespect for the bounds of standard signal processing, and you start to think that maybe there are a lot of these ideas just lying around, and it’s just that no one’s thought of them yet. And some of them even sound good. I plan to find as many as I can.

I think that many audio programmers are much, much too focused on the engineering side of the discipline: how to design the correct filter for a particular use case, how to increase the fidelity of a reverb while keeping down CPU usage, how to more exactly model a vintage analog compressor, etc. Start with a goal, and design to achieve that goal. This is interesting, important, and useful. But not enough people are thinking “lol what if you did this ridiculous thing to an audio wave, what would that sound like?”

Most of the time, your crazy idea sounds terrible. Or you accidentally reinvented the wheel. But sometimes, it actually sounds kind of good.

For my monthly plugin recommendation… maybe you already know of Dillon Bastan’s work. But if you don’t (I didn’t), you should go check out his very cool audio effects inspired by nature, physics, and math. They’re unfortunately only available as Max for Live devices, so you have to have Ableton to use them. Some cost money, but honestly some of the best ones are free. My favorite so far is Strange Mod, which is a chaotic LFO based on some weird math.

Cheers,
Caleb

p.s. I just moved to L.A., and I want to meet you guys! If you’re in the area, email me or DM me on substack or Instagram or whatever and let’s hang out!

Get yourselves ready for another Nudist Audio newsletter!

For your monthly audio animalia, I present some new sounds from a plugin I’ve been working on. Good things are coming out of speakers.

dry/wet electric guitar:

dry/wet synthesizer:

In Nudistort-land, Claude Stucki recently made this amazing video using a Roland VG-800 to split out audio from each of his guitar strings… which means you can have an instance of Nudistort on each string individually. (!!!) This is a thing called hexaphonic guitar—it does wonderful things to a distortion, and if you’re a guitarist you should absolutely check it out.

Lastly, I want to keep up my tradition of recommending cool underground plugins! This time it’s unplugred, a solo developer who’s making some really creative plugins with beautiful and intuitive GUI’s. They’re all donation-based, so you can check them out for free and support her if you’d like. My favorite right now is “Diet Audio.”

Much love to the Nudistorters! Stay weird.
Caleb

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Behold! The fourth Nudist Audio newsletter.

I’ve decided to send out these emails via Substack from now on, which I’m just using as an email provider. This is because there are now enough of you that I can’t just send out a regular poorly-formatted Gmail anymore. So, begrudgingly, I’ve been forced to adopt Substack and its fancy font.

As a little teaser… here are a few sound animalia for a mystery effect I’ve been working on:

1. acoustic guitar:

2. piano:

3. drums:

Unrelatedly, I’ve been trying to get my ear to the ground on cool new plugins popping up. For the more technical among you, I found this NUTS and little-known plugin called Delay Cat, which is genuinely new… delay/grain thing? Can produce some truly strange sounds that I haven’t heard anywhere else. I love plugins like this—just make sure to read the user manual. Not free but currently on sale for $40.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s been sending in presets, feature suggestions, and bug reports for Nudistort! Keep ‘em coming! I’m currently compiling a playlist with songs that use Nudistort, so if anyone has music they’ve released with it, I’d love to hear. Stay weird as always.

Cheers,
Caleb

p.s. I don’t know how these Substack buttons work exactly, but I want to try them out. Click if you feel inspired :p

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Some of you have asked to see these old issues, since they don’t appear on the Substack archive. So here they are!