Best Glitch Plug-ins

What is a glitch plug-in?

There are so many cool things that we can do with audio, but that are not possible with most stock effects in DAWs.
Modulating sounds is a practice that brought some genres to shine, like Trap music, and even created other ones, like Dubstep and Drum & Bass.

They’re all about being creative, and each plug-in offers a specific set of cool things.

Free

These plug-ins are all available for free. However, this doesn’t make them not worthy of your attention.

illformed Glitch 1

A simplified version of the Budget counterpart, Glitch 2. The main difference is that you can’t trigger multiple effects at once, but only sequence them.
It’s quite a limitation if you like to blend effects together, but it can definitely help with simpler applications like coming up with new rhythms on drums!

There are also 4 different filters available for the master sound and for each effect.

Glitchmachines Fracture

Fracture is a versatile effects processor geared toward electronic musicians and sound designers. This plugin was designed to add glitchy articulations and abstract textures to your projects. Use it on anything from drums and percussion to synth lines and sound effects. The only con of this plug-in is the poor GUI, but we understand that it fits well into the big picture designed by Glitchmachines.

Glitchmachines Hysteresis

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

De La Mancha Therapy

If you’re looking for a unique way to mangle sound, here it is. Therapy is an effect plugin that allows you to "express your innermost feelings, neurotic ramblings or burning, murderous rage, and have the results presented in full stereo audio psychosis". Instead of the usual knobs or sliders, therapy invites you to type words to generate the psycho-somatic algorithms that will "shape, bend and fuck up your audio according to your own twisted mind". "Express yourself through free association, random babbling or drug-induced, histrionic word-vomiting. Type it in, hear the results, scream at the moon."

Inear Display Danaides

Danaides is a sequenced sound mangler with a powerful modulation section.

It gives you the ability to route the input signal through a filter and three sound destruction effect processors: a "driller" that will loop and repitch very small slices of the signal, a "metalizer" delay, and a sample rate reducer.

With the built-in effect and dry-wet sequencers, you can generate various tempo-synced effect phrases and modulate the overall depth of the effect.

Danaides includes a powerful LFO section with flexible routing and waveform morph. 

Among the Free tier, Danaides is probably the most nerd-friendly plug-in you can get your hands on.

Freakshow Industries Backmask

This thing is just freaky. It’s mostly notable for reversing audio in chaotic ways. If you’re after ghostly and haunted sound processing, this is the best pick.
Also, it’s free because they let you steal it on their website.

Budget

These plug-ins are all for sale. We can say that they’re all worth more than what they cost. If you want to commit to some expenses, this is the place to start.

Audiomodern Loopmix

Audiomodern Loopmix is a plugin that allows chopping, retriggering, reversing, pitching, and rearranging loops.

The cool thing is that you can do it with 6 loops at the same time, making it possible to mix them together.

It's not like the other plugins in this list because you're actually dragging and dropping loops into it, mangle them inside it and then exporting them back into the DAW as audio files.
This tool instantly screams "use me to create drum loops!", but there are a couple more applications that are too good to ignore, which are resampling and mixing multiple loops of your own jamming sessions with each other, and also coming up with complex drops using bass one shots.
Vocal chopping is also another viable approach.

Get it at Audiomodern

Get it at Plugin Boutique

illformed Glitch 2

This plug-in is very similar to its top-tier counterpart, Effectrix. Probably better, at least in terms of aesthetics.
It’s missing a couple of minor features, but the Die Roll button is a huge Plus, if you don’t want to think too much about where to place the blocks in the sequencer.
Just try your luck and see what sounds best.
Also, the copy and paste buttons in each effect section is something that saves you a lot of back and forth and trying to make things match.

MeldaProduction MRhythmizer

Ever wanted to get your hands on GrossBeat but don’t have FL Studio?
MRhythmizer does the same thing, and is probably also better.
It’s among the best picks for effects like scratching, tapestops, tapestars, reversing, halftime, doubletime, stuttering and beat repeat.
Once you learn how to use the graph, you unlock a palette of effects that can inject a lot of ear candies in your projects.

Vengeance Glitch Bitch

Another take comes from Vengeance. Glitch Bitch offers a handful of processing, plus a panel with plenty of settings like filters, pan modulation, pitch, etc.
The unique thing about it is the Glitch button, which is needed to launch the effect.
It needs some automation to work properly, but it’s nice to see an effect that can be enabled whenever you need it instead of an effect that needs to be disabled when you don’t, like most plug-ins in this list.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

Dmitry Sches Tantra

Tantra is a rhythmic multi-effect plug-in with a rich feature set and high-quality processing modules. With Tantra you can get any kind of sound and turn it into a complex rhythmic progression, with lots of movements among the deep produced sound space.
The GUI is sexy, but the workflow is something that can be too time consuming to most people. The fact that the sequencer affects all the effects simultaneously feels quite like a bottleneck though. To compensate for such a thing, at least there are the A and B layers to switch between.

Twisted Tools Buffereater

Buffeater is a real-time, dynamically ordered, granular multi-effect for all versions of Reaktor 5 (and this can be a limitation to most).
The effect works by capturing live audio and storing it in a temporary buffer, which allows for real-time processing of the incoming audio using granular synthesis and other methods.
The coolest thing about it is having a stepper for each single effect, which helps to understand what’s going on with the whole processing.

Top Tier

These are the elite of the digital realm. They require some commitment to your wallet, but the number of features and the quality of performance they offer is among the very best you can find around nowadays.

All these tools will make your life easier in one way or another. They don’t have the magic of doing the job for you, but they will definitely help you deal with transients the best way possible.

Sugar Bytes Turnado

Turnado features an insane amount of effects spanning from scratch to delay, beat repeat and tapestop, for a total of 20.
You can use 8 of them simultaneously, which is a lot!
The cool thing about it is that it works like a set of macros that you can automate in your DAW. It has quite a steep learning curve, but the possibilities are insane.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

Sugar Bytes Effectrix

Effectrix is probably the oldest plug-in in this list. It’s a sequencer of effects like Looping, Scratch, Reverse, Tape Stop, Bitcrusher, Stutter and many more.
It’s best suited for enriching loops rather than adding ear candies here and there across the arrangement.
The master mix knob makes it easy to add multiple variants of effects without having to go for multiple instances of the effect.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

Sugar Bytes Looperator

Looperator is a sequencer as well, but with a different take! In fact, you have six lines of effects, each one comprising a number of automations within the same category.
For example, you have a line where you can trigger different forms of beat repeat, another where you can set different filters, and so on.
Unlike most effect sequencers that force you to stick to a certain setting and repeat it in multiple spots of a given-length bar, you can play with more complex sequences.
Also, it has a waveform monitor that makes you visualize how your audio is being transformed.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

Output Portal

Looking for dope-sounding effects? Portal has plenty of them to offer. The X/Y pad makes it fun to record smooth modulations. Each effect can be tweaked to taste.
The preset library is enormous and it’s very well sorted for all kinds of needs.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

iZotope Stutter Edit 2

iZotope never fails at delivering high-end and innovative software. Stutter Edit 2 includes a myriad of processing opportunities that outshines most plug-ins in this list.
The learning curve is rather steep, and it’s also easy to get lost with tweaks, but once you find your workflow with it, then you’re open to a world of ear candies that’s hardly comparable.

Get it at Plugin Boutique

Cableguys Shaperbox 2

Shaperbox 2 is something like GrossBeat, but on steroids. It features 7 different types of processing (Time, Pan, Drive, Crush, Filter, Width, Volume).
Multi-band processing is a huge plus, but the thing that sparks a lot of creativity is the set of shapes that you can change with a click, so you can try different rhythms on each effect.
Also, being able to sequence all these effects to taste makes the whole processing a lot more accurate and fun to do!

Get it at Cableguys

Get it at Plugin Boutique