Ewan Bristow and CRQL have created pure, manic magic with this one. UZU mangles sounds through a wormhole, via what is technically a spectral Frequency Domain Filter. And yes, FL Studio fans may recognize some of the characteristics of the phaser in Image-Line’s wonderful Harmor synth.
When we last joined the adventures of Ewan Bristow in spectral land, he was phase locking. But it’s possible that some of your sounds escaped unscathed; your music became locked in the kind of dull linear time that only simpletons would enjoy. You need to scrub that space-time continuum harder.
Well, you’re in luck, as here comes UZU, in VST3, CLAP, and AU format from CRQL. You get up to 8192 notches, with controls for speed, width, offset, depth, and blur, plus a handy octave/Hz slider and 1x/5x multipliers at top, plus an important option to retain bass. (That looks a little like a low-pass filter if you didn’t check what it was first, but you get the idea.)
This has been made notorious by FL Studio and Harmor. Here’s a fast breakdown of that architecture:
But once you start down the rabbit hole of playing with phasers like this, you may not, you know, stop. These are phasers for people who thought they didn’t like phasers. (Just think about filters and spectra and you’ll be fine — you have an allergy to vintage analog phasers, which tend to more limited and predictable results.) This basic architecture yields lots of possibilities, and you may already hear that UZU doesn’t sound quite like the effect in FL, even while closely following many of the same parameter choices (down to a knob/switch, very nearly — having oct/Hz be continuous is really nice).
These effects were well known outside FL, too — they were just deemed too exotic, perhaps, to make it into your tool. So here you go — for a recession special of £13 or about $17/15 EUR. And unlike FL, it runs natively on Linux and CLAP (as well as macOS, Windows, AU, VST3).
As with LOCD, UZU benefits a lot from experimentation and tuning, including some major changes if you adjust the number of notches. Different parameter combinations and source material can almost make this seem like completely different effects.
It also works really well with modulation. (I show Ableton Live, which will happily accomplish this and has a lot of nice devices, but started this week watching Hany Manja in Bitwig Studio, and was reminded by how elegant that Modulators approach can be. Choose your own modulators/DAW/environment, of course.)
In that video above, you’ll see that using triggers, etc. is a great idea. I just got lost in some drums at the moment with Novation’s new Play (free with their Launchkey MK4, including for current owners).
Plus, for good measure, some keys. The mind boggles. What a gorgeous and unexpected effect.
Updated: I ran with this quickly on my first play Friday night, but for more inspiration, Ewan has added more sound demos on the site, and there’s a demo version coming, and then he posts this. Wow… what a gorgeous track and beautiful use of the effect:
Enjoy! And once again…