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When you press a key that has no Gesture assigned, Stutter Edit is labeled as Inactive, and the Stutter screen goes dark; playing a Stutter Gesture causes the modules that are active in that Gesture to light up and animate in time to the audio, giving you visual feedback of what’s going on; and playing a Generator Gesture causes the Generator screen to overlay the window. You can see everything that’s going on without ever having to manually click and switch screens. Stutter Gesture modules include Stutter, Quantize, Gate Width, Jump Pan, Stereo Delay with its own Band-Pass filter, resonant Low-Pass and High-Pass Filters, Bit Reduction, and Lo-Fi (sample rate conversion) effects, plus direct control over Dry and Effect Gain. A special module called Buffer Position displays graphically which parts of the audio loop the plug-in is processing at any given moment. Generator Gesture modules include Gain, Pitch, Lo-Fi, stereo Delays and resonant BandPass Filters, and an audio send that runs the Generator through the Gate of whatever Stutter you’re playing back, as well as a choice of audio types (assorted noise sweeps and hits) plus all of the controls that let you precisely dictate when and how they’ll end. Every parameter can be set to oscillate between two values with an adjustable time curve, from logarithmic through linear to exponential, meaning you can bias whether a parameter lives most of the time at one end or the other of its range or smoothly changes between the extremes. You can also lock an effect so it doesn’t change over time. Global controls include a sweepable filter controlled by Pitch Bend, and Timeline Override, a Mod Wheel controlled function that breaks the plug-in loose from DAW sync for dramatic speed-change effects. Living with a stutter The hardest part of learning to use Stutter Edit effectively is understanding how the Stutter, Quantize, and Buffer Position controls work. Yes, you can just use preset Gestures and have a ball, but if you hear a particular sound in your head and want Stutter Edit to make it for you, it really helps to have a good feel for how these controls function. Just above the individual effect modules, there’s the Stutter Matrix. This lets you select just how finely the audio is chopped at any given instant, from dotted half notes all the way down to triplet 1/1024th notes! By selecting certain available sizes and removing others, you can finely control how the resulting audio will feel when played back; a common range is from quarter notes down to sixteenths, sometimes with dotted eighth notes selected as well to add a bit of swing. What makes it confusing is that if you have more than one value selected in the Matrix, the Stutter length will jump from value to value in a manner controlled by the Stutter module. When you combine these controls with

Quantize, which can be randomized or set to a variety of patterns like Walk, Skip, and Stagger, things can get very confusing in a hurry. Oh, and I guess I haven’t mentioned that the Stutter Matrix also includes a fouroctave keyboard that lets you loop chunks of audio so fast that it actually plays back musical pitches? You can step through preselected pitches to play arpeggiated melodies, and even jump back and forth between melodies and stutter patterns. Yikes! To really learn how this all works together, I recommend that you build yourself some simple Gestures and carefully vary one parameter at a time to hear what it does. Soon you’ll develop an instinct for how to get the sounds you want. One thing that helped me a lot was to practice with a carefully chosen

One thing that I perhaps haven’t emphasized enough in this review is how much fun Stutter Edit is, and how convincingly it does its work. Really good use of this effect can turn a good song into a great remix, and let you build up fascinating songs from relatively simple building blocks. My daughter was listening to her iPod in the car at one point during my review, playing me the Kill The Noise remix of the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cobra Starship. She was commenting on how the remix was, to her ears, much more interesting than the original track, because of all the cool tricks being played with the drums and vocals... and I was hearing very little, if anything, that couldn’t be done on the fly by an accomplished player using Stutter Edit.

loop specifically for teaching purposes. Rather than use a drum beat that might be hard to follow when chopped up and rearranged, I used a very easy-to-understand vocal loop, either my voice counting “One and two and three and four and...” for however many beats I wanted, or a very distinctive vocal line with crisp syllables right on the bars and beats—I used a line from Queen’s English, reviewed January 2010, warped in Ableton Live for a very rhythmic playback. In a week or so I got very good at setting up the effects I wanted, but I don’t ever want to hear Miss T talking about storing fresh meat again. (Don’t ask.) One thing worth noting is that while Stutter Edit does use a small bit of RAM to buffer the audio it’s playing with, its built-in effects are very low-power when compared to things like reverbs and high-end pitch shifters... on my relatively low-end test Mac, a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2 GB RAM running Ableton Live 8.2.1 under Mac OS X 10.6.7 with 128 samples of latency, I never saw more than 10% load. So there will never be an issue with CPU load, even when you’re doing the fanciest edits.

Conclusions Accomplished player? Yes. You need to practice with Stutter Edit to get really good at it; while the grid-based edits and quantization can make using the plug-in idiotproof, that doesn’t automatically make every remix you create a work of genius! You’ll want to select Gestures that work for you, build up Banks of your own sounds, and marry them carefully to the material you’re remixing for the best results. And if you’re using multiple instances of Stutter Edit, you will have to plan out how to send recorded MIDI data to the different instances for realtime control. I recommend you head over to the iZotope website for audio examples, where individual modules are demoed for you to hear for yourself what they do. If you’ve always been curious about remix-style edit effects and wondered how you could bring them into your tracks for an ultramodern touch, look no further: Stutter Edit not only makes the process easy, it makes it fun. Price: $249 More from: iZotope, www.izotope.com
RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2011

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Recording - September 2011

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