JMC’s Cyberdrive, which supports VST2/3, AAX and AU hosts on Mac and Windows machines, is one of those plug‑ins that’s designed to break your audio in interesting and creative ways. At its heart are three distortion engines, which are connected in series, and each can be set to one of 64 different distortion types. The distortion types encompass all manner of analogue emulations, plus some seriously disturbing digital tools that go way beyond simple bit reduction and wave folding. They are arranged as Classic, Modern, Pixel, Amp, Pedal, Doom and Freak, the last of these being where you can access more experimental distortion techniques such as ring mod, feedback, FM and spectral processing. Adjustable HP and LP filtering (6‑96 dB/octave) is provided for each distortion section. There’s also a feedback section with tempo sync and a Follow knob that controls the depth of the level follower modulation. Other modules can be placed inside the feedback loop, though, so this can go much further than simple repeat delays.
Six processors at the bottom of the GUI offer Dynamics, Tone 1, Tone 2, Motion, Profile and Space options, each of which has its own sub‑menu of variants. For example, Dynamics offers a choice of Modern Compressor, Classic Compressor, Maximiser, Gate, Transient, Hyper or Limiter. Motion serves up all the classic Flanger, Chorus, Vibrato, Tremolo and Phaser effects but also adds in some lo‑fi wobble. Profile provides a range of speaker cab emulations plus a selection of metallic‑sounding IRs, while Space is devoted to reverbs and delays. Those two tone sections offer a range of useful EQ types including notch filters. One particularly interesting filter mode is Multi, which is essentially a crossover — everything above and below the set frequencies passes through unprocessed.
Mayhem has never been so intuitive!
As if this weren’t enough to play with, there’s also a section at the very bottom edge of the window that lets you drag the various processing modules into a different order, and that includes the ability to place individual distortion engines between the other tone‑processing blocks. Mayhem has never been so intuitive! You also get a Dice button for randomising your patches, with a menu allowing you to decide which elements get randomised and which stay the same, and as usual there are presets to get you started. AGC (Automatic Gain Conrol) is available for each distortion section, along with a clip warning LED and an extra control that changes function depending on what type of distortion is being used. All sections have their own bypass buttons. Overall master buttons activate oversampling, master AGC, drive level adjustment, stereo width adjustment and the wet/dry mix balance.
The outcome? With Cyberdrive, you can damage your audio in superbly creative ways that run from a dusting of analogue‑style saturation to full‑on, snarling digital chaos. There are combinations that sound like a howler monkey has swallowed an electronic speak and spell game, and others that sound like something really bad happening in a scrap yard. There are phantom tones produced by the more radical bit‑wrecking options — some are reminiscent of an FM synth fighting it out with a ring modulator — while other settings might put you in mind of an electrical storm on an alien world. Drum loops are obvious targets for this type of processing, as such material can be changed beyond recognition, but really you can use it to tear apart pretty much any source, from bass lines to vocals, pianos to orchestras. If cruelty to audio is your thing, you have just got to get Cyberdrive — destruction rarely gets this creative!