Hi there. I’ve ported my Paranoia effect to the OWL using the C++ environment. A different take on the same effect ships with the Reaper DAW.
Paranoia’s structure is inspired by the OTO Biscuit, but takes a few things in very different directions, and this version is optimized for the four knobs on the OWL and tuned for guitar. Most controls are interactive and multi-modal.
It’s a kickass gated fuzz with the right settings, and might also be useful for ruining drum loops or bass synth.
Topology:
Resample → Boost → Bitcrush → Mangle → Bandpass → Saturate → DC Filter
Controls:
- Gain: -24dB to +6dB gain. Note: effect can go loud on some settings
- Resample: 0->50: 6-bit crush, variable resample rate. 50-99: 10-bit crush, variable resample rate. 100: 10-bit crush, no resample.
- Mangle: This one gets a bit weird. There are 16 different bit-manipulation patterns; the first half are pretty subtle, the second half get crazy. This control smoothly sweeps between adjacent patterns. This can introduce anything from light texture to rectification to gating and inversion effects. It is very interactive with the bit-depth reduction (6 or 10) in the previous control.
- Filter: This controls both bandpass frequency and resonance. It sweeps through the frequency range four times with increasing (decreasing?) resonance as the control goes to max.
Really quick demo through an amp sim here - but it pairs up a lot nicer with a real valve amp to soak up the craziness: Stream Demo of Paranoia distortion/resampler/mangler by remaincalm | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
Hope it’s useful! Cheers.