TECHNE
DEREZ4

Lo-fi

Pull the sample rate down and dial in the crunch.

From a light grit on drums to a sound that falls apart. The screen shows what the crunch adds and what it takes away.

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  • macOS · Windows
  • VST3
  • CLAP
  • 5 machines
Techne DeRez4: the screen showing the sound going in and coming out, with the peaks the crunch adds, over the RATE dial and the texture and level controls

From grit to collapse

RATE

How hard it crunches. High up, an edge on drums. Lower down, a rounded retro texture for bass and synths. At the bottom, the sound falls apart.

REACT

Crunch that follows the hits. Toward HIT the attacks break up and the rest comes through cleaner. Toward TAIL the hits stay whole and the decays fall apart. Try it on drums and percussion.

GRID

What happens to the quiet parts. Toward GATE they drop out, so tails and room fall away. Toward ROAR they turn into a buzzing roar. Try it on drum rooms, pads and long tails.

See what it adds and takes away

The screen draws the sound going in and the sound coming out, one over the other. It is also the control: drag on it to set the crunch.

The screen: the input as a pale line, the output as a filled body, filled peaks where the crunch adds tones below the 3.00 kHz marker and a dotted area above it where the top end is taken away
Filled peaks are what the crunch adds. The dotted area is what it takes away.
Added and removed

Filled where the output has more than the input, dotted where it has less. Watch both move as you turn RATE.

Drag the screen

Across sets RATE, up sets GRID, in one move. Double-click to start over.

Hear only the change

Turn MIX all the way to INV and you hear only what the crunch changed.

JITTER · WIDE

JITTER loosens the crunch so it stops sounding steady. WIDE crunches the left and right sides apart.

Specs

Formats
VST3 · CLAP
macOS
12 Monterey or later · Apple silicon and Intel
Windows
10 (64-bit) and 11 · x64
Not yet
Audio Unit and AAX — Logic Pro and Pro Tools cannot load it.
Channels
Stereo and mono.
Price
Free. Your email gets you a key that works on up to five of your machines.
Technical details The DeRez4 engine, Techne’s additions, the pad and the measurements.
The engine

Airwindows DeRez4, ported bit for bit and checked against the compiled original (maximum difference 0). With JITTER, REACT and GRID off and MIX at WET 100, how it opens, the output is DeRez4’s exactly.

RATE

Captures a point every N samples and draws straight lines between them at full floating-point resolution: the rate comes down, the word length does not. The hold is a whole number of samples, so it moves in plateaus. It lifts the level: +1.9 dB at ÷4, +6 dB at FULL. The bottom is silence.

JITTER

The capture clock made unsteady. Just above OFF each hold picks between its two neighbors, so RATE turns continuous; higher, every hold is spread at random, up to ±50 %. Seeded, so a render repeats. Level change under 0.25 dB.

REACT

An onset detector (zero latency, about 40 ms wide on a drum) pulls RATE toward FULL and GRID toward OFF away from the attacks (HIT) or on them (TAIL). It only cleans, never goes past the knobs. The level lift is held, so it does not pump: +0.1 dB at HIT 100.

GRID · µLAW

Each captured point quantized, 16 bits just off center down to 2 at either end. GATE is mid-tread: quiet material falls to zero, at GATE 100 everything under about −12 dBFS. ROAR is mid-rise: quiet material becomes a half-step square; digital silence stays silent. µLAW puts the steps on a μ-law curve (G.711, μ = 255).

BRIGHT

A Bezier smoothing before and after the crush. Lower is darker (at 0: −6 dB at 2 kHz, −21 dB at 5 kHz); from 87 at 44.1 kHz it leaves the path and the crush is heard raw. It changes in a few steps, at the marks under the knob.

BASSIS

A resonant low shelf before and after the crush, not a high-pass: at the default −12 dB at DC and +5 dB at 60 Hz, flat from 240 Hz. Higher thins the sound. OFF takes it out of the path.

MIX · OUTPUT

MIX runs WET, DRY, INV; INV 100 is the input minus the processed signal. No level matching: the crush delays by one hold, so a blend combs. OUTPUT only attenuates (−∞ to 0 dB); it opens at −2.9 dB to offset the lift.

WIDE

The right channel’s capture cycle starts half a hold behind the left’s, with its own JITTER draws. The left stays DeRez4’s own. No effect on a mono track.

The pad

A 4096-point FFT of the input and output mids, about 30 times a second; 0 dBFS is a full-scale sine. ADDED is the output 6 dB or more over the input, REMOVED 6 dB or more under. The line is the fold (half the capture rate); dashed lines mark its multiples; the level line is GRID’s step.

Latency

None reported to the host. The crush’s own delay of one hold is part of the effect.

Bypass

A 10 ms crossfade; DeRez4 keeps running underneath and comes back warm.

TRY IT ON YOUR DRUMS

Free. Five machines per key.

DeRez4 is coming December. Leave your email and we’ll tell you the day it’s out.

The crunch is the Airwindows DeRez4 algorithm by Chris Johnson, used under the MIT license. JITTER, REACT, GRID, WIDE, MIX, the pad and the meters are Techne’s; GRID’s two sides, µLAW and MIX follow ideas from Airwindows HipCrush, DeRez2 and DeBez.