Sonic Charge has announced Permut8, their first new VST / AudioUnit since Bitspeek last year.
Here’s what they have to say about Permut8:
Permut8 is an effect that can take on many forms. It is one of those products that is hard to describe in a couple of sentences. The kind that a marketing department would hate (luckily we have no marketing department at Sonic Charge).
It excels in digital noises of all kinds, but can also sound warm and lush. It can do conventional delay effects and it can create circuit bent mayhem from hell. Perhaps more important than what it does is how it does it.
Permut8 gives you a number of primitive operators that you combine in different ways to manipulate the playback position on a delay-line. This runs on an imaginary vintage digital processor with 12-bit A/D D/A conversion and variable clock frequency from 0 to 352kHz. On top of this you will find a number of “analog” components for filtering, limiting, saturation and more.
Did that sound complicated? Permut8 is complicated, but it is also a product that is designed for experimentation and happy accidents, and boy do they happen often. Bring your crash helmet.
Here’s a demo track that features Permut8. The track is called Obliter8. It uses only MicroTonic, Synplant and Permut8:
Permut8 will be available Aug. 13 for $66 via the Sonic Charge site.
I’d like to be excited about this. I really would. Maybe I need to know more about it still. The demo track may not do it justice. It seems to produce much of the same effect and overall music that I’m hearing everywhere. Stuttering, repeating, etc. hopefully it does more. I really don’t want to trash talk it because I like sonic charge. But so far I’ve seen what looks like more comPlex mangler devices for less money.
Here’s a link to one such device:
http://www.store.beatwife.com/?page_id=19#ecwid:category=314471&mode=product&product=13467378
Besides the odd unsettling and sexist title, the device seems so far more interesting and cheaper too. Maybe though I’m not fully understanding what permut8 does.
yes, i like stuff like this, eurydice, the twisted tools stable and so on. They are similar in certain ways, but can also be very different if looked into more closely. its like an old drum machine or synth, so similar to its rivals, yet so different.
@Dram Have you checked out the different demos we have on our home page? Including the user contributed one in the comments section? It is not a beat repeater / mangler per se although I used a lot of those effects on this particular demo track. Think of it more as a virtual digital signal processor which you can program to create many different type of effects. The techniques used to generate these effects are not those of your standard software solution. It is inspired of how early hardware signal processors worked and sounded, but will take you beyond that too by allowing very high sample rates etc.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it when professionals listen to and read the discussions of their customers and potential customers. I guess I need to look at and listen further. I only heard the demo here, and without seeing a video of it in action, I found it hard to form an opinion on whether it’s a good option for me. I appreciate your further explanation.
Have always liked microtonic btw!!