DRIFT STRANGE and WRECK Review

Reviews

Jun 10

All The Machines sent me three distortion plugins: Drift, Strange, and Wreck. Each in a vertical format with a simple set of sliders, this tryptic very much reminds me of Noise Engineering’s free Ruina distortion. Personally I’d prefer if each of these were different modes in a single “multi-distortion” plugin, especially if they could be chained or multi-band split, but they are distinct enough to be their own plugins. Because they are on the simpler side, I’m reviewing all three as a collection in order from least to most aggressive.

DRIFT

Drift is my least favorite, the distortion varies from subtle to raspy and dry, but the gain compensation seems a bit extreme, meaning you have to increase the output manually as you add more distortion. The idea behind drift seems to be subtle motion applied to distortion. This subtle motion doesn’t seem to add much to the over all sound in my opinion, but perhaps in more nuanced mix settings this will come in handy. Drift also has a nice feedback delay that lets it get into distorted screams.

STRANGE

Here we go! Strange has quite a bit more bite and destruction in its algorithms. Four different engines provide multiple flavors: Fold, Shatter, Warp, and Glitch. Strange is a distortion based on strange attractors, the idea is that this organic chaos will never repeat the same distortion shape. The results are interesting and can get quite harsh, perfect for industrial noise. Feedback and Chaos really open this one up creating even more piercing screams than Drift.

WRECK

Finally Wreck is by far my favorite. I’m not really sure how to describe this one, it leans into total chaos and glitch territory. Wreck will leave your signal completely unrecognizable if you are not careful. Described as mangling audio at the cycle level, Wreck creates crazy digital tones with your signal, it almost sounds like it is arpeggiating the distortion at hypersonic rates like those fun 8-bit arp sound effects. This one can expand to reveal more controls, with different settings and modes everywhere. I may have to come back and revise this review in the future as I really am not familiar with many of these settings or what to expect from them, all I can say is that I love the results.