Spectral Disturbtion

Spook Out Those Harmonics.

Spectral Disturbtion is a Multiband Chebyshev Polynomial Distortion Effect.

What Does That Mean?

Distortion is all about adding harmonics to your sound – thats what gives it bite.

Most distortions add odd and/or even harmonics to a signal, but with Chebyshev Polynomials, you can choose specific harmonics – resulting in some super unique, interesting, and weird sounds that can exist somewhere between distortion and pitch shifting.

Chebyshevs are complex formulas, but you don’t need to understand it at all to use Spectral Disturbtion – the interface is intuitive, musical, and easy to use. It centers around an XY pad to ‘perform’ polynomials 1 thru 9 – its expressive and fun to play!

Because its multiband, you can choose different harmonics and different distortion amounts for the bass, mids, and high frequencies. Its capable of some brutal noise, old radio crunch, and can even add weird harmonies to your sound.

To make things even more interesting, its got SLOO to slow down parameter changes, and BOO, which tangles up the internal routing – making it a little more unpredictable – and way more fun to play!

How It Works

Spectral Disturbtion starts by dividing up your sound into 3 frequency bands. Each band is saturated and then put through a Chebyshev Polynomial shaper.

The polynomial number its shaped through is controlled via the central XY pad – just drag the corresponding emoji around to perform it.

The Chebyshev’ed signals are then combined back together and saturated one last time before being run through hi and lo pass filters.

There’s a SLOO knob, which adds a slew to almost every knob and XY parameter on the plugin. This is essentially a ‘time shmear’ – meaning it slows parameter changes down: move a knob, and if the SLOO is high, it can take a full 30 seconds to shmear from point A to B. This is a very powerful performance function, particularly with drones or gestural music.

Then of course, theres BOO. The BOO knob tangles up the internal wires… The multibands send the wrong signals to different Chebyshev shapers. I’m not going to explain what this does exactly – but this knob adds a little chaos and a lot of stereo to your sound!