MSTRKRFT Masters of Trash

The electro duo joined WMD to bring us the TRSHMSTR. Let’s check it out

Since 2009, MSTRKRFT have been blending a unique, trashy, almost punk set of distorted synth tones with hard hitting electro drums – a sound that, in crude terms, was akin to Daft Punk on acid through a tube amp.

They’ve now teamed up with WMD to create the Eurorack module TRSHMSTR, based on that same unique blend of synth tones. MSTRKRFT’s favoured process is to run synths through wah pedals then into a distortion pedal, or vice versa (usually a Dunlop Cry Baby and Ibanez Tube Screamer).

Working with WMD, they brought that tone shaping into modular form and heavily expanded on it. TRSHMSTR is great for driven and moving tones with its aggressive combo of distortion and band pass filtering. The filter is already pretty nasty enough and has switching over three resonance flavours with feedback saturation.

The drive gives a wide range of overdrive tones with three flavours available on a switch, drive control, high pass filtering to control the low end hitting the drive and plenty of CV control. There’s ‘cross normalling’ i.e. patching a single input to the filter and routing that through the filter to the drive or a single input to the drive and route through the drive then filter. You can even use both units independently. We’ve had great results running in various configurations. Experiment! Try patching drums through the drive while you process a delay feedback loop through the filter, it’s great for a range of applications.