Feeling destructive? K-Devices’ Shaper2 is a fast route to digital edginess, it’s on discount now. And it is not mentally demanding – it’s a beautiful magical Thor’s hammer, in a good way.
There are quite a lot of waveshapers about. But K-Devices has combined a number of harmonious (or rather intentionally disharmonious) modules for particularly easy hands-on control. I normally read parameters very carefully, but – there’s something about that UI. You just want to start dragging things intuitively, like a toddler with an activity center. And it’s immediately rewarding to do so.
And while synths and modular environments may already give you some of this, it’s really handy to be able to just drop this on a track, as you’ve got quite a lot of stuff in a compact space:
- Glitch gate, with new smoothing
- 5-function waveshaper: “Muffin, Multistress, Cracker, S&M, Bit&Samps” – I could try to describe them, but trial-and-error with your source material is actually the whole point
- Transform with Clip, Warp, Fold, and sFold
- Delay/resonator doubling as comb filter
Choose which algorithms and parameters you want, dial in some settings, and see what happens. And then you can drag and reorder modules for different signal chains. (Sadly, that’s serial only – this thing is screaming out for some parallel processing, too. Shaper3?)
It’s all very, very digital, whether you’re getting metallic resonating tones or grungy distortion.
New in this version are a number of features that move this into must-buy territory. Smooth on the Glitch Gate makes it far more musical. Lopass/Hipass filter helps tame the output. Blend and Color, Gain and Mix all combine to let you mold your resulting sound rather than just glitch everything blindly.
It all feels honestly like something you ripped out of a couple of high-end Eurorack modules, except it’s 59 EUR – on sale through the end of this month for EUR 39 with this discount code:
shaper2cdm
Through May 31, for y’all.
They’ve also posted some great walkthroughs of their stuff, including a first tutorial on Shaper 2:
And tons of examples:
(plus more on Instagram)
I’d encourage you not to use the presets at first. Okay, I always encourage that, but this time for real. It’s all so specific to source material that it’s great fun to squeeze and squish and glitch your sound while dialing as you play. Hell, I even turned a cowbell into something interesting.
K-Devices I associate with Max for Live as that’s where they got their start – and I’m sure I’ll be using this in Ableton Live regularly – but for kicks, I messed with this using the modulators in Bitwig Studio, too, since I mentioned it yesterday. And it’s right at home there.
Go check it:
Now I have added incentive to work on my production because… huh, this would have been a good secret weapon to not tell anyone about. Keeps me on my toes.
But seriously, K-folk – do think about some multiband or parallel options. Shaper Pro. It’s already too good; I want more.
Check their beautiful Phoenix Bundle, too.