Distillery: Because structured mayhem is awesome!
AirRaid Audio has given us a way to seriously destroy audio in very structured manners! Distillery chops, pitch-shifts, glitch’ifies and transforms any input into rythmic, structured mayhem! In it’s essence, Distillery is built on a robust granular engine. It features real-time beat (or note) looping, gating, time-stretching and pitch-shifting, all of which which can be played directly from the keyboard or programmed from Reason’s sequencer.
The concept behind Distillery is simple: it maps note inputs to “gestures”, which are customizable configurations of the built-in granular effects. This allows you to play the effects in real-time. There can be as many configurations as there are keys on your keyboard. This way you can easily house different types of effects, as well as create subtle and nuanced variations of each configuration in a single unit.
Examples of Applications:
- Real-time, tempo-synced beat looping and repeating
- Real-time pitch-shifting, controlled via playing the notes on your MIDI keyboard
- Wild pitch-shift and tape-stop-like effects
- Ultra-fine granular time-stretching and tweaking
- Complete loop-mangling chaos, all easily playable from your MIDI keyboard
- Onboard envelope follower and stereo LFO for further insanity
- CV gate and pitch note input, allowing Distillery to be controlled via Reason’s Matrix pattern sequencer
In addition to it’s standard, multi-gesture mode of operation, Distillery also offers Pitch Tracking mode. Simply click the Track button and Distillery, while limited to one gesture, will automatically map the Pitch to incoming MIDI note data. This allows you to re-pitch incoming audio, and play it as you would any synthesizer. Glitching up beats or completely retuning a synth line are just of couple of possible applications. The onboard envelope follower and stereo LFO make it a breeze to design dynamic and natural, yet precise note-triggered effects.
In summary Distillery is an ensemble of truly useful FX devices to create buildups, drops, or ear candy in your tunes with very little effort. While there are Rack Extensions with somewhat similar features, the complex nature of Distillery makes it stand out.
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