Glitchmachines: Hysteresis

A free glitch-delay plugin geared toward creating robotic artefacts & musical malfunctions.

12 December 2023

Glitchmachines was established in 2005 by sound designer Ivo Ivanov. During the early stages of the company, it focused on building handcrafted circuit-bent hardware instruments. It sold a limited number of units through boutique synth shops in California and custom made instruments for numerous artists and sound designers. In 2010 the focus shifted to creative audio plugins and sound effects. Glitchmachines’ vision is to defy creative and technical trends by providing forward-thinking sound effects and creative audio software in order to continue to innovate.

Process anything from drums to synths, guitars, vocals and sound effects with Hysteresis, the versatile effects processor geared toward electronic musicians and sound designers. On top of being able to create contorted signal mutations, it can also be tamed to generate classic delay effects.

Hysteresis features a delay effect with stutter, lowpass filter, and modulation effects thrown into the feedback signal path. The input signal first goes through a delay line on each stereo channel, but instead of sending the output directly back into the delay line, the resulting signal is sent to a stutter processor, then to a lowpass filter and finally to another delay line on the opposite channel which is modulated for creating chorus-type effects. The output of the second delay line is then routed back to the first one on the original channel. The stutter effect can be used to generate reverse delays, noisy pitch-shifting, or raw granulation. The lowpass filter has an internal LFO to make the cutoff frequency oscillate, and the modulation processor can act as a subtle chorus or noisy modulator depending on the range of the modulation rate.