Bitbox Micro Firmware: The Character Chain

Four effect slots in a row across the whole mix: Destruction, Overdrive, Colour and Saturation. Each slot holds one of four effects, sixteen in all. Every one is a port of a plugin by Chris Johnson of Airwindows, used under its MIT licence.

Turn a slot's Amount up and that effect joins the mix. At zero it is gone.

1The Four Banks

Each bank is a family of four. Every effect keeps its Airwindows name, so the Airwindows site has far more on each one.

Destruction

Destruction is lo-fi and breakage, for when the mix should sound broken on purpose: old samplers, aliasing, clang and buzz.

#	Effect	Sound	Tone
1	Pockey2	old-sampler crunch and grit	how far the sample rate drops
2	DeRez3	smeared, aliased lo-fi	how few bits: harsher as you turn it up
3	Ring Mod	metallic, bell-like clang	the ring's pitch; fully down silences it
4	Fracture2	folds the wave into buzzy harmonics	where the folding starts

Overdrive

Drive the whole mix, from a warm valve glow to big, dirty harmonics.

#	Effect	Sound	Tone
1	Tube2	warm valve push	how hard it is driven
2	Drive	straight overdrive	cuts the lows before the drive; near the top it thins and quietens
3	Mackity	a small desk's input overloaded	how much of the extra level is taken back
4	Huge	big, loud, dirty harmonics	Nasty: how harsh it gets

Colour

Colour is the sound of the gear rather than an effect: consoles, tape and a transformer. It is subtle at low Amounts, and a good first stop.

#	Effect	Sound	Tone
1	Channel9	console warmth and edge	which console: Neve, API, SSL, Teac or Mackie
2	IronOxide5	tape, with flutter and hiss	tape speed: slower is darker
3	ToTape8	a fuller tape machine, with bump and flutter	darker or brighter
4	Coils2	a transformer pushed hard; eases off at the very top	from a good transformer to a cheap one

Saturation

Saturation adds weight and density, smoothly. It is the gentlest bank and comes last, so it rounds off everything before it.

#	Effect	Sound	Tone
1	PurestDrive	the cleanest, most transparent saturation	how hard it drives, with the level held steady
2	Spiral2	smooth, rounded warmth	presence
3	Density3	thick, dense saturation	a low cut; its centre already thins the bass, so turn it down for full lows
4	Mojo	fat saturation that lifts the level	how much of the lift is taken back

2Where It Sits

The chain comes first on the master bus, before the EQ and the compressor, so they hear what it made. It hears every pad on Out 1 and 2, tails included. Pads on Out 3–6 skip it. See devices.

The slot order is fixed. Destruction comes first, then Overdrive, Colour and Saturation. You break things before you polish them.

3The Controls

Each slot has an Amount, a Tone and a way to pick its effect. They are all MIDI CCs on channel 1, like the EQ and the compressor.

Slot	Amount	Tone	Next effect	Pick effect
Destruction	CC 14	CC 18	CC 26	CC 22
Overdrive	CC 15	CC 19	CC 27	CC 23
Colour	CC 16	CC 20	CC 28	CC 24
Saturation	CC 17	CC 21	CC 29	CC 25

Amount is how much of the effect you hear. Zero is off. An off slot costs nothing.

Tone is each effect's most useful second control. The bank tables above say what it does. It starts at its centre.

To choose the effect, map one of the last two columns. You only need one.

Next effect is for a button. Each press steps to the slot's next effect and wraps back round after the fourth.
Pick effect is for jumping straight to one. Its range splits into four: 0–31 is the first effect, 32–63 the second, 64–95 the third and 96–127 the fourth. Use it from a sequencer, a DAW or a controller snapshot, when a song should always recall the same effect.

A change of effect fades out and back in. It never clicks.

Every move shows in the pop-up, such as OVERDRIVE Huge over Amount 76%.

The pop-up: a dark box reading OVERDRIVE Huge on the top line and Amount 76% beneath it.

4Things to Know

Three things are worth knowing before you stack slots.

CPU

One or two slots are light. All four at full, with the heaviest effect in each bank, take about a fifth of the processor. The two tape effects in Colour are the heaviest. To watch the load, turn on the CPU bar.

The CPU bar at three loads, stacked: green only at a light load, green into amber at about 78%, and on into red at about 95%. A white tick marks the recent peak.

Quiet Tails Come Up

Saturation lifts quiet sound more than loud. Stack two or three slots and a reverb tail that used to fade away hangs on, with noise you never heard before. High makeup on the compressor lifts it again, and so does auto makeup at extreme settings. If tails turn long and grainy, back a slot off first.

Some effects change the level as well as the sound. Match the levels first. Then judge.

Kept Through Power-Off

The chain survives a preset change and power-off. Each slot comes back with the Amount, Tone and effect you left it on. See what they have in common.

The Airwindows licence travels with the patch, in LICENSE.html.