DUST 12.47

This is the varispeed fader. Classic hardware samplers locked pitch and time together — tuning a sound up meant speeding up the playback clock. You couldn't change one without the other. Dust 12.47 recreates this relationship as a core processing mode.

Move the SAMPLER SPEED fader up and the audio plays faster and higher. Move it down and it slows and drops in pitch. A 12-semitone move doubles or halves the playback speed.

This means that short sounds get shorter when pitched up, and longer when pitched down. On drums, this gives transients a different character at every tuning — the attack on a snare sounds harder and tighter at +7 than at -7. This is not a side effect. It is the sound.

The SAMPLER SPEED fader is the primary character control of the plugin. Even small movements — a semitone or two — can completely change the energy of a drum loop.

The PITCH fader uses a modern pitch shifting algorithm. Pitch changes but time does not. A kick drum pitched down 7 semitones stays the same length. This is the tuning tool — use it to lock samples to a key, to create detuned layers, or to shift a loop to sit in a different part of the frequency spectrum without changing its rhythmic feel.

Used in combination with SAMPLER SPEED, you can tune the overall character of the signal (with SPEED) then fine-correct the pitch without affecting the texture (with PITCH). Or use them to opposite effect — speed the machine up while pitching it back down, creating a tighter, more aggressive signal that sits at the same pitch as the original.

Bit depth controls how many amplitude steps are available to represent the audio signal. At 16-bit, you have 65,536 possible values — effectively transparent. At 12-bit, you have 4,096 values. At 4-bit, you have 16.

As bit depth decreases, two things happen: quantisation noise increases (a grainy, gritty texture appears), and loud signals start to clip harder at their peaks. The kick drum quantises differently from the snare, and the interplay of those quantisation artefacts at different amplitudes creates texture that no clean digital sampler can produce.

12 bits is the classic reference point — the sweet spot where grit and musicality meet. Below 12, the character becomes more aggressive and obvious. At 8 bits you enter lo-fi territory. At 4 bits the signal is barely recognisable but can create something extraordinary on the right material.

Above 12 bits, the plugin gets cleaner. At 16 bits, the bit reduction is essentially inaudible, and you are using the plugin purely for its other processing stages.

Sample rate reduction works by downsampling the signal to a lower clock rate before upsampling it back to your session rate. Content above half the reduced sample rate (the Nyquist frequency) is not filtered before downsampling — this creates aliasing, where high-frequency content folds back into the audible spectrum as new, inharmonic frequencies.

~26,040 Hz is the classic 12-bit sampler low-clock reference. At this setting, any content above 13,020 Hz aliases. On a drum loop, the hi-hats become slightly impure — the aliasing adds intermodulation between cymbal frequencies that sounds like the cymbal is being processed by something analogue and imperfect. This is the sound.

As you reduce the sample rate below 26k, aliasing becomes more pronounced and moves into the midrange. At very low rates (under 8,000 Hz), the audio becomes telephone-quality or worse — but the aliasing patterns create entirely new musical content that can be fascinating as a texture layer.

The 12/26k button snaps both BIT DEPTH and SAMPLE RATE to the classic 12-bit / ~26k reference point simultaneously.

DRIVE applies soft saturation before the bit reduction and sample rate stages. This is critical to the character of the plugin because saturation before a bit crusher changes how quantisation noise behaves — louder harmonics from saturation hit the quantiser at different amplitudes, changing which quantisation steps they land on.

Low DRIVE values add warmth and density. Higher values push the signal into visible saturation — peaks flatten, transients round slightly, and the overall signal becomes thicker before it hits the converters. On drums, moderate drive tightens the low end. On sustained material, it adds harmonic texture that makes bit reduction sound less clinical and more organic.

CRUNCH adds asymmetric waveshaping — a form of distortion that introduces odd and even harmonics in unequal proportions, similar to the behaviour of an overdriven output transformer or analogue tape saturation. Unlike DRIVE (which is symmetric), asymmetric distortion creates a DC component and introduces second-order harmonics that sit an octave above the fundamental.

At low values, CRUNCH adds warmth and slight thickness. At higher values, the signal begins to sound "crushed" in a way that is distinct from both bit reduction and drive — slightly broken, slightly analogue, slightly wrong in the best way. CRUNCH at high values on hi-hats creates a metallic smear that can sit under a mix without competing with it.

Jitter is instability in the sample clock — the timing of when each sample is read varies by a tiny amount. In a perfect digital system, samples are read at exactly regular intervals. In analogue hardware, the clock oscillator drifts slightly due to temperature, electromagnetic interference, and component tolerances.

The sonic effect of jitter is subtle but important: it adds a slight randomness to the sampling process that feels "alive" compared to a perfectly clocked system. At low values (the default 5%), JITTER is barely audible — it simply removes the "too perfect" quality that can make digital processing feel sterile. At higher values, the effect becomes an effect — a slightly wavering, unstable quality that works particularly well on sustained material or vocals.

On drums, moderate jitter (10–30%) can add a micro-groove feel where the transients have a slight human-like inconsistency. Beyond 50%, it becomes an audible modulation — use at your own risk and discretion.

NOISE adds a broadband analogue-style noise floor to the signal. At low values it adds subtle presence and warmth — the kind of barely-audible breath that vinyl records have, which makes silence feel like something rather than nothing.

At higher values, the noise becomes part of the texture. A snare hit surrounded by noise has a different quality than the same snare in silence — the noise provides context and density. This is why many producers deliberately add noise to otherwise clean digital recordings.

NOISE becomes especially powerful when combined with the GATE. By setting the gate threshold correctly, you can gate the noise so it only appears between hits, or only during hits — creating rhythmic texture rather than a constant hiss. See the GATE section for details.

NOISE also interacts with NOISE SC mode, where the noise burst amplitude itself becomes the signal that drives the gate. See Section 08.

The level at which the gate opens. When the signal (or key signal in NOISE SC mode) rises above this threshold, the gate opens and audio passes through. When it falls below, the gate closes.

At -60 dB (the default), the gate is effectively bypassed — the threshold is so low that almost any signal will open it. As you raise the threshold toward 0 dB, the gate becomes more aggressive: only louder transients will open it, and quieter material will be gated out.

Setting the threshold in the -30 to -20 dB range is a good starting point for rhythmic gating on drums. At -10 dB, only the loudest peaks will trigger the gate.

How long the gate takes to close after the signal drops below threshold. The attack is fixed at approximately 2ms — fast enough to let transients through without choking them.

Short release times (10–30ms) create a staccato, chopped effect — the gate slams shut almost immediately after each transient. Medium release times (80–150ms) let the tail of the sound breathe before closing. Long release times (300–500ms) create a gate that stays open for a long time, only closing in the spaces between beats.

Release is one of the most important controls for setting the rhythmic character of the gated signal. Try automating it.

When NOISE SC is off, the gate's key signal is the dry (pre-processing) input signal. The gate opens when your original audio is loud and closes when it is quiet — the standard behaviour.

When NOISE SC is on, the key signal changes to the noise burst generated by the NOISE control. The gate now opens and closes based on the random amplitude of the noise floor — not based on your input signal at all.

The effect is that the gate is no longer rhythmically locked to your material. Instead, it opens and closes in a pattern determined by the statistical distribution of the noise bursts. Higher NOISE amounts create more frequent bursts and therefore more gate openings. Lower NOISE amounts create sparser triggering.

The result is organic, unpredictable rhythmic gating that evolves over time. No two bars will gate in exactly the same way. Applied to the full signal (which is what always happens — the gate acts on everything, just triggered by the noise), NOISE SC creates a textural variation that is impossible to recreate with a standard MIDI-triggered gate. It sounds alive because its timing reference is alive.

Removes content below the set frequency. At 20 Hz, it is essentially flat — a safety filter that prevents DC content. As you raise it, the low end is progressively removed from the processed signal.

This is useful for keeping the bit-crushed signal from muddying up the low end of your mix, especially when combined with the dry signal at the MIX stage. You can have a bitcrushed mid and high signal blended over a clean dry low end — the HIGH PASS removes the low end from the wet signal so the dry signal's low end comes through cleanly.

Removes content above the set frequency. At 20 kHz, it is transparent — the full spectrum passes through. Reducing the low pass creates a muffled, lo-fi character independent of the sample rate reduction stage.

Note that sample rate reduction already acts as an aliasing low pass (content above the Nyquist folds back rather than being removed), so this filter acts differently from the Nyquist roll-off — it is a clean cut rather than an alias. Use it to control the brightness of the processed signal.

A high-frequency shelf that either brightens or darkens the processed signal. Unlike the low pass (which is a cut), TONE is a tilt — reducing TONE rolls off the high end gently while pushing TONE boosts it, adding presence and air.

TONE is useful for compensating for the natural darkening that comes from sample rate reduction and bit crushing. A small TONE boost (+2 to +4 dB) can restore some of the clarity that the converters removed, creating a sound that feels both vintage and present.

The amount of drift applied to drive level, sample rate, and tone simultaneously. At 0%, the plugin behaves the same way every time — a perfectly calibrated machine. At higher values, these parameters wander around their set values in slow, smooth movements that are correlated but not identical.

Moderate drift (10–30%) makes the plugin feel organic and alive without obviously modulating. High drift values (50%+) create audible slow modulation — useful as an effect in its own right.

The speed at which the drift wanders. Low MOTION values produce very slow, almost imperceptible movement — like a machine slowly warming up over many minutes. High MOTION values produce faster wobble — useful for tremolo-like effects at extreme settings.

Controls how independently the left and right channels drift. At 0%, both channels drift identically — the stereo image is stable but the overall signal drifts together. At 100%, left and right drift completely independently — they may be at different drive levels, different sample rates, different tone settings at any given moment.

High STEREO values create a wide, unstable stereo image that sounds genuinely like two independently aging machines playing in sync. On stereo material, this can create a sense of width and movement that is almost impossible to replicate with conventional stereo processing.

The wet/dry blend. At 100%, only the processed signal is output. At 0%, only the dry signal passes through. At 50%, both signals are blended equally.

Parallel processing is one of the most powerful ways to use Dust 12.47. Run the destruction hard — extreme bit reduction, aggressive noise, high drive — but blend it back at 30–40% against the clean dry signal. The result is a signal that has density and character but retains the clarity and dynamics of the original. Classic producers achieved this by accident, routing audio through imperfect hardware with no bypass. You are doing it deliberately, with full control.

The final output level after the wet/dry blend. Use this to compensate for level changes introduced by the processing chain. Aggressive bit reduction and saturation can significantly change the perceived loudness of a signal — OUTPUT brings it back to a comparable level to the dry signal for fair comparison and consistent mixing.

Delta mode outputs the difference between the wet and dry signal — the processing itself, in isolation. Mathematically: output = wet − dry. When DELTA is on, you hear only what the plugin is adding or removing. When DELTA is off, you hear the normal processed signal.

Delta mode has several uses. The most important is diagnostic: by listening to only what the plugin is doing, you can precisely judge the character of the processing without it being obscured by the source material. If the delta signal sounds like noise and grit, that is what the plugin is adding to your signal. If it sounds like a filtered version of the source, that is what is being shaped.

Delta mode is also a creative tool. The difference signal can be extracted and routed independently if you print the delta output to a separate track — giving you only the "dust" without the source material.

Controls how fast the SAMPLER SPEED parameter reaches its target value when you move the fader. At 0, the speed change is instantaneous — the pitch and time jump directly to the new position. At higher values, the engine smoothly interpolates to the new speed, creating a pitch bend or gradual time stretch effect.

High SPD GLIDE with slow fader moves creates the effect of a record player coming up to speed or winding down — the machine gradually accelerating or decelerating. Automate the fader for controlled pitch-bend effects. Combined with GRID mode, you can create smooth transitions between speed ratios.

The same concept applied to the PITCH fader. High PCH GLIDE values create smooth pitch portamento when moving the fader. In MUSICAL mode, glide creates a smooth transition between interval snap points — the pitch slides from a perfect fifth to an octave, for example, rather than jumping directly.