1. Snaking acid lines with Devastor 2 and Fazortan

1 Let’s process a TB-303-style acid line with D16 SilverLine effects. Drag Clean Acid.wav (a saw sequence from D16’s Phoscyon) and Backing Track.wav into a 124bpm project. The dry 303 riff is far too clean and dynamic in its current state, but we can squash the signal with the devastating Devastor 2 distortion – insert an instance on the acid channel.

2 Devastor 2 features an analogue-emulating diode clipper circuit and three multimode resonant filters. Let’s add drive with the clipper first: click on the Shape curve and change the clipper curve to the Asymmetric Hyperbolic Tangent algorithm, then crank up the Preamp to around +40dB while backing the Output Volume down to around -37dB. Nasty!

3 Filtering the signal pre-clipper will greatly alter the distortion effect. Click Devastor 2’s Signal Routing diagram and select the 1-PRE/2-POST option: the signal now enters filter 1, passes through the clipper, and is then filtered post-clipper by filters 2 and 3 in parallel. Change Filter 1’s Type to Bandpass, then set a Cutoff of around 450Hz and Resowidth to around 30% for a nasal, gnarly timbre.

4 Pull back the input Dynamics knob to reduce the input signal’s dynamic range before it enters the other stages, giving more consistent distortion. For a snaking, phasing movement, add Fazortan next in the chain, set to the Background Resonances preset. Add a sprinkle of vibe and sparkle with some bass-cutting EQ, sidechain compression and trippy delay repeats courtesy of D16’s epic Sigmund.