Spectral Stutter

Parameters

Stutter Length Ms — How long each captured slice plays before the next trigger fires, in ms, 10–500. Short slices (10–30 ms) sound granular and broken; medium (50–150 ms) feel like clear rhythmic stutter; long (300–500 ms) become slower repeats. Length and rate together set the stutter rhythm.

Additional controls

Stutter Rate (Hz) — How often the stutter triggers, in Hz, 0.5–50. Each trigger captures the current spectral moment and starts a stutter cycle. Slow rates (0.5–4 Hz) for slow rhythmic stutter at song-tempo subdivisions; mid (5–15 Hz) for buzz-roll character; fast (20–50 Hz) for almost-pitched stutter clouds.

Count — Number of repeats per stutter trigger, 1–32. Each new trigger interrupts the previous stutter — high count + slow rate produces dense overlapping stutter clouds; low count + matched rate is clean rhythmic repetition.

Decay — How much each successive repeat is attenuated, 0–1. 0 = no decay (all repeats at full level — useful for sustained stutter, can be loud). Higher values fade the stutter out across repeats — closer to a delay-with-feedback character. 0.3–0.6 gives natural-feeling decay; 1.0 makes only the first repeat audible.

Pitch Shift Per Rep — Pitch shift applied progressively across the repeats, in semitones, −12 to +12. 0 keeps each repeat at the same pitch (clean stutter). Positive values raise pitch on each repeat (rising stutter — classic glitch effect). Negative values lower pitch (descending). Useful for FX-style transformations and IDM glitch tropes.

Crossfade — Smoothing between successive stutter slices, 0–16 frames. 0 produces hard edges (clicky, glitchy character — appropriate for harsh glitch styles). Higher values smooth the slice transitions (more musical, less artifact-prone). 2–6 frames is a balanced default.

Phase Mode — How phase information is handled when stuttering — affects the spectral character of the stutter:

• Preserve — keeps the phase from each captured frame intact (cleanest, most “frozen” character).
• Blend — interpolates phase between source frames (smoother transitions, less precise).
• Dominant — uses the loudest bin’s phase per frame (good for tonal sources).
• Complex Avg — averages the complex spectrum across slices (most diffuse, can produce phasey artifacts but also unique transformations).

Most use cases work best with Preserve; experiment with the others for sound design where the phase choice affects the overall character (especially on tonal material).

About Spectral Stutter

Spectral Stutter is rhythmic capture-and-replay in the spectral domain. Each trigger snapshots the current spectral content and replays it as a series of decaying repeats. Unlike a granulator (which uses time-domain grains), the slices here are spectral — pitch, formants, and brightness can be transformed per-repeat without the artifacts that time-domain stuttering would produce. Useful for rhythmic glitch effects, IDM-style fills, percussion stutters, and turning sustained sources into rhythmic textures. Pair with the Spectral Freeze Stutter for LFO-synchronized variants, or Time Quantize to lock the rhythm to a grid.

Generated 2026-05-05 from K2K_Dev@96730bdc by scripts/gen_lexique.py. Edit _intros/ or _overrides/, not this file.