Sync Stutter

A tempo-synced stutter effect. It chops incoming stereo audio into musical slices and loops each one in place — the classic glitch, retrigger, and machine-gun-fill sound, locked to your clock.

How it works

The patched clock is divided into sub-beats. At the start of each sub-beat, Sync Stutter grabs the first slice of incoming audio and re-emits that slice on repeat for the rest of the sub-beat, crossfading the loop seams so they don't click. A long slice plays back almost intact; a short one loops many times per sub-beat, and once the slice gets short enough its loop rate climbs into the audio range and the repeats fuse into a buzzy, pitched tone. The left and right channels are stuttered independently, preserving stereo width.

Controls

  • Div — the rhythmic division of the stutter, stepped through twelve note values from 1/32 up to a dotted whole note. This sets how often a fresh slice is captured.
  • Len — the length of each captured slice as a fraction of the sub-beat, from 1% to 100%. Long values give one near-whole repeat; short values stack rapid retriggers and, at the extreme, ringing pitched textures.
  • Smooth — how hard the loop seams are. At the bottom the slices butt together with clicky, gated edges for hard glitch stutters; turn it up to crossfade the repeats into smooth, blurred grains, widening the overlap from a tight 5% toward 50%.
  • Pitch — transposes each re-emitted slice, from 0.5x an octave down, through unity at noon, up to 2x an octave up. Nudge it off center for pitched and octave-jumping stutters.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend, from untouched input to fully stuttered.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo audio to stutter; the two channels are processed in parallel.
  • Div / Len / Smooth / Pitch / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope for accelerating rolls, shifting subdivisions, morphing seam smoothness, pitch sweeps, or fading the stutter in and out.
  • Clock — tempo reference. While the Clock control is set to Ext, Sync Stutter measures the time between pulses to set its rate; leave it unpatched and it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — realigns the stutter grid to the downbeat, so repeats stay locked to your sequence.
  • Out L / Out R — the stuttered stereo result.

Tips

  • Feed it a steady clock and tie Reset to your bar to keep stutters glued to the groove.
  • Pick a fine Div and pull Len short for audio-rate repeats that take on pitch — instant glitch leads from any source.
  • Sequence or modulate Len CV to morph a single held note from a clean repeat into a buzzing roll.