Crush Groove: Bit Reduction

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Today everything is Hi Def.  It’s the new buzz phrase to someday be replaced with the next even-greater level of realism to be developed.  Audio and video seems to always be striving for some greater clarity.  Leave it to musicians to tell clarity to fuck off.

When Leo Fender was designing his guitars and amps in the 50’s the last thing he wanted was dirt coming out of his products.  But, it wasn’t long though until a slashed speaker cone, a faulty mixer channel or an overheated amp started giving some players the extra “balls” that they’re music was 
asking for.

Since then, countless amps and stompboxes have been created to distort the pretty sine wave that their guitars produce naturally and the rest is history.  

 

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Jimi, Reduced Jimi, Getting Crushed Jimi, Fully Crushed+Voodoo

From the late 70’s on the focus of digital audio has been, for the most part, to achieve the highest level of clarity.  At the same time, simple processors were providing the music for video games and powering the first digital synth engines.  These sounds were far from “perfect” but after a few decades many have become charmed by their quirky, bleepy tones.

We can now take our guitar signal and bring it back to the Galaga days and beyond.  How?  Bit Crushing!   Otherwise known as bit reducing, we are actually taking the amount of building blocks available to process the sound and drastically reducing them.  When you do this, the processor has to decide how to organize aspects of the signal which can result in a wide spectrum of glitchy, fuzzy and unpredictable insanity.  It’s like if you were to ask a 4 year old to draw you a picture of a your car.  You’ll for sure get something but nothing like your driving.  Players looking to experiment with “synthy” tones.  Look no further.  Bit crushers can mangle and contort sounds waves better than Yoko Ono and Jimmy Buffett combined.

Most of these bit crusher devices reduce the quality of processing then add or exaggerate a number of parameters from octave dividing to arpeggiation.  This is when it get’s WAY out there.

Check out the vids to see if if bit crushing fits in your box.

 Hexe's Bitcrusher III is rather insane