Tips & Tutorials

How to use D16’s Decimort 2

Decimort 2 is D16 Group’s high quality bitcrusher that manages to achieve an oxymoron: it’s dirty yet clean.

Unlike stock bitcrushers, Decimort’s internal processing frees the plugin of unwanted artifacts, resulting in an untainted crushed sound. This feature guide will overview some of the essential components of Decimort 2 that you’ll want to be aware of to get the most out of the powerful plugin.

1. The Quantizer

D16-Decimort2-01

The Quantizer determines the extent to which the amplitude (a value corresponding to loudness) of the signal is degraded.

  • The resolution alters the quality of the sound by reducing the number of bits available to the sound’s waveform. Bits are responsible for determining how detailed we can get with expressing differences in amplitude. Note that in practice, the number of amplitude values available is 2 raised to the power of this value. For example, a 4 bit resolution results in 16 possible amplitude values. The resolution and the resampling frequency (which we’ll get to shortly) together make up the main “crushing” aspects of bitcrushing.
  • Dithering adds white noise to a signal to cover up the unwanted artifacts of quantization. In other words, dithering masks ugly noise with a more ‘musical’ noise. The rotary knob adjusts the amount of this noise that you’re adding to the signal.

2. The Resampler

D16-Decimort2-02

The Resampler is the heart of Decimort 2, containing the frequency, jitter, approximative filter, and images filter parameters. Let’s take a look at each of these controls in more detail:

  • The frequency parameter controls the frequency that the signal is resampled at, ranging 44 Hz to 44.1 kHz. A higher resolution will more closely resemble the original input – for reference, most music we listen to is sampled at 44.1 kHz, the upper limit of the Resampler.
  • Jitter controls the intensity of sporadic, brief deviations of resampling parameters.
  • The approximative filter removes harmonic content above the Resampler’s Nyquist frequency (the highest frequency that can be accurately sampled without creating unintended artifacts) before the signal is resampled.
  • The images filter removes images, the artifacts created by the Resampler’s activity.

3. The Filter

D16-Decimort2-03

The Filter allows you to sculpt your sound with analogue-modeled pass / reject filtering.

  • Type allows you to select between low pass, band pass, high pass, and band reject filters.
  • The cutoff determines the cutoff frequency for the low pass and high pass filters, and the center of the band for the band pass and band reject filters.
  • Reso / band width determines the resonance for the low pass and high pass filters, and the band width for the band pass and band reject filters.

Pro Tip: Toggle between Pre and Post to flip whether the filter is applied before or after the resampling.

We hope you found this tour of Decimort 2’s features useful! If you have a question, leave it in the comments below.

March 15, 2018

Harrison Shimazu

Harrison Shimazu is a composer, content strategist, and writer who’s passionate about democratizing music creation and education. He leads the Splice blog and produces vocaloid music as Namaboku.