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12. Defacer by Audio Assault

1 You can never have too many quality distortion plugins, so we’re more than happy to follow up our FuzzPlus3 demonstration with the equally awesome Defacer from Audio Assault, downloadable from audio-assault.com. We start with a lovely strummed passage from Ample Guitar M II Lite. 2 With the part looped for continuous playback, drag Defacer into the track’s insert effect slot. Start by cranking the A/B knob all the way to the A side, then increase the A Distortion to around 11 o’clock. That’s gritty but still kinda pretty! It’s also loud, so turn the A side’s Volume down a bit. 3 The LP knob controls the low-pass filter. Set it to around 2 o’clock for a dark, filtered tone. At this point, it still sounds like a typical distortion effect, of the sort you’d be likely to use on guitar. Don’t be fooled, though: Defacer is a thoroughly malicious bitcrusher, too! You’ll see what we mean if you turn the Deface knob up. Try around 3 o’clock. 4 Yikes – that’s harsh! Turn the A/B knob all the way over to the B side to get back to the cleaner tone. We’ve yet to try that Rectify button, so go ahead and click it in. Ouch! How can one button be responsible for so much horror? Amazingly, there’s worse to come… 5 Crank the B side’s Deface knob up to 3 o’clock, too. It sounds quite different to the A side with that Rectify button kicked in – we’ve now got an almost industrial tone. It’s hard to believe this was once a lovely acoustic guitar passage, but you can get some of the original character back by turning down the B side’s Mix. 6 Twist the A/B knob to and fro to hear different combinations of the two settings. It could be fun to automate that parameter – but first you’ll need to work a bit at matching the levels between the two sides. Switch back and forth between A and B, adjusting their individual Volumes until they sound about equal.