As aggressive and face-melting as glitched-out music can be when you hear it live in the club, the production side of it requires painstaking attention to detail. There simply aren’t any cutting corners when it comes to making amazing glitches in genres like Glitch Hop, Trip Hop, Dubstep, and other genres of bass music.
Nobody knows this better than Kyral X Banko —a duo native to Colorado—and longtime friends and members of Mersiv’s MorFlo Records.
Their latest single, a headbanging anthem named “Juggernaut,” is a masterclass in these types of glitches and should be considered the gold standard for anyone looking to implement such styles and edits into their own productions. And to celebrate the release of this smashing single, we invited the boys on to share their top five tips on making better glitches. In this article, they dive into just how game-changing one specific approach can be, their favorite plug-ins to make awesome glitches, and more.
But before we dive into the high-level glitch tips, take a listen to their latest single so you have a reference point for the knowledge they’re about to drop.
Use The Mudpie Method
The vast majority of our sound design and relentless pursuit of developing our ‘signature sound’ has come from a method that we learned from Mr. Bill in a masterclass he did in Boulder, CO called ‘Mudpies’.
What Is Mr. Bill’s Mudpie Method?
Basically, this is a style of sound design that involves setting up a very intentional set of macros in an instrument rack (Operator, Wavetable, Serum etc…) & then creating a MIDI clip with a bass progression or even just one long midi note. You then set up an audio track just beneath that midi channel to ‘resample’ the audio that comes from adjusting the macros that you’ve set up while recording/converting the ensuing madness into audio, where it is more easily workable/editable.
We will usually put the MIDI clip on a loop so that you can basically record an infinite amount of new random variations and noises. You can definitely catch us starting many sessions with multiple hours of mudpies, and then bouncing the (often very long) audio file for future use, typically labeling them by ‘instrument type’ and ‘key/bpm’.
The best way to use this technique is to drag in any given ‘Mudpie’ clip and slice it so that you’re only using tiny sections that end up being amazingly unique little pieces of audio. In summary, the ‘Mudpie’ technique made the entire process of sound designing SO MUCH more fun vs. spending hours and hours trying to find that ‘perfect’ sound or tweaking the same knobs over and over in a VST.
This completely changed the game for us, & the possibilities with this technique are truly endless. Hats off to Mr. Bill.
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Use A Granular Plug-In On Your Resamples
Output’s Portal Plug-In Is Their Favorite Tool For Granular Glitches
From here, there are a number of next steps that we take with the bounced Mudpies.
The first thing we’ll usually try is resampling the same audio, but this time running it thru a granular plugin (our go-to is Portal) to get even more filler sounds to create a wonky aesthetic/space in the mix. The reason we use the same mudpie/audio for this is the resulting sounds/fx will mesh perfectly with the bass sounds since they came from the same exact audio clip.
The best thing to do with these ‘granular/fx’ type Mudpies is to repeat the same process of exporting the resulting audio and labeling them something like ‘D# FX Portal Mudpie’ so that you can continue to stack up a bunch of these and use them for future projects.
We love using these for intros/bridges/outros as well to really create a living/moving atmosphere in our tracks.
Use A Glitch Plug-In On Your Entire Track
Another useful thing to try out to get wonky glitchy sounds is to run your entire finished (or almost finished) track thru a plugin like Glitch 2 which we use a lot.
This will give you even more weird artifacts and blips to use and pepper into your production and will continue to add to your arsenal of cohesive sounds since again, it is all coming from resampling the same audio and will therefore sound very consistent throughout.
Let The Drums Guide The Rythmn
We definitely focus very heavily on the drums/percussion in our tunes to really guide and move the track & provide a solid foundation for all the melodic / bass elements to sit on top of.
For Ableton Live users, one thing to try out that we do very often is to use the ‘Beats’ warp mode and select the little arrow pull-down menu, and then choose the single arrow that points to the right. This will essentially make the transient of any given drum sound much shorter or ‘choked’ and will lend to a more glitchy/unique drum pattern as opposed to having all of the percussion sounds (like hi-hats or cymbals) be the same sample.
Really try to focus on making your drums unique and weird! It’ll help your whole track feel more interesting throughout.
Use Different Warping Algorithms In Ableton
Lastly, and this is also specifically for Ableton users, we have gotten really into using the ‘Texture’ warp mode on samples to get some really cool stretched-out glitchy sounds on things like vocals or snares (any sound will yield some cool results though).
Be sure to really mess with the Flux and Envelope sliders in Texture mode & have fun with this one!
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