Similar vst to Op-1 phone effect?

Didn’t think I’d use this effect when I first got my op but it’s grown on me when used kind of subtly. Anyone know of a vst like it for occasional use in daw work?

Also does anyone know why sometimes this effect when put on the master seems to make a (centre panned) tape track really wide in the stereo field, but other times it doesn’t effect the stereo image at all? Is it a frequency/levels threshold kind of thing?

@Callofthevoid Phone grew on me as well, it was certainly a slow burn. Effectively it seems to be a bit crusher which is easy enough to find that part as a VST but there is clearly more going on.


The whole frequency thing (the tuneable aspect is great) spitting out odd, bubbled, digital artefacts isn’t something I’ve come across anywhere else. There may be an element of delay involved in this (albeit very mangled with stepped pitching happening) which could account for the (sometimes) wider stereo effect. The frequency pitch certainly does cause differences in the output on the master but I need to play around with using it there a little more to try clock what is happening.

@wolflegjon thanks for the info. I’ll see if there are any weird vst bit crushers out there that do something similar.
Yeah the master stereo field thing seems a little unpredictable, haven’t figured out what triggers the ‘wideness’ yet. Will have another look at it tonight and try to figure it out.

This is probably a different matter, but when using phone as a master effect, it works as a stereo effect.


I really love phone, there’s tons of sounds one can coax out of it. No idea if there’s a similar VST.

closest I’ve heard is the glitchmachines effects. they have two free ones that are worth a look. similar to phone on the op-1, these are effects that can work some magic if used very subtly instead of pushed to the front of the mix.


Not same as phone but a pretty decent bitcrusher VST!
https://www.tritik.com/products/krush

Have not used it but have watched a few demo videos and it looks n sounds capable.


they ran out of display space, to abbreviate dwsp? this is worse than if they had made it skeuomorphic

Check out Sonic Charge Permut8, it’s a VST that simulates crazy lofi digital artifacts, with a pretty quirky/playful interface and lots of potential for happy accidents. Good fun to play with and can definitely make sounds in the ballpark of Phone.

I think Phone isn’t a bit-crusher but instead a tiny glitchy granular effect: the input audio is continuously sliced up into fragments and each fragment is played back at a particular speed with a ramp envelope.


Blue controls the pitch of the grains, Green controls the length/envelope of the grains (99 is long/smeared), White controls… some sort of random modulation of the pitch? (and probably other stuff), Orange is wet/dry (but also seems to control the threshold for freezing the buffer – turn it up and it’s more likely to “glitch”/stutter.

(like vehka said, on master fx Phone adds a cool stereo effect… I think it’s maybe just swapping the L/R channels for some grains.)

At least, this is what it seems like to me :slight_smile:


was going to say the same as raigan said
I’d just amend his description with: I think white is essentially the number of repeats of each grain. There’s something more to it, either a random component or some level-triggered component, but that’s how I think about it.

You could also try DBlue GLITCH.

@raigan pretty much owns Phone =)


been a while eh?
Check out Sonic Charge Permut8, it's a VST that simulates crazy lofi digital artifacts, with a pretty quirky/playful interface and lots of potential for happy accidents. Good fun to play with and can definitely make sounds in the ballpark of Phone.

+1 for Permut8 - very excellent plugin.

@beefinator: good catch! I really wish I understood what was going on inside Phone, it definitely seems like most of the encoders are changing multiple internal parameters...

@tasmansea: ;) I've been really busy with work, sadly that's not changing anytime soon.. I think it's been a year or two since I recorded anything good with OP-1 :/

@tasmansea:

@<a href=“https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/profile/317/raigan” class=“Username” style=“font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.1px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(66, 157, 168); background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>raigan<span style=“font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.1px; color: rgb(37, 38, 30); background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”> sadly, I’m in the same boat. have 2 months off coming up though… 'be good to be hear something new from you. always enjoyed…



<span style=“color: rgb(37, 38, 30); font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22.1px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>ohya, also Phone

Phone is my favorite effect for lead sounds. I typically start with the FM synth, turning the blue encoder clockwise just a bit. I set the LFO to element / gravity and have it control pitch. This is great for expressive playing. Then I add the phone effect. I use shift+blue to fine-tune the modulation freq. down one octave, and I adjust the orange to control the balance between the original tone and the octave-down tone. By fiddling with the other phone settings, I can get the octave-down part of the sound to be randomly delayed a bit from the regular part of the sound. This whole setup sounds very natural and expressive. I thought the phone effect was kind of a joke when I first bought the OP-1, but now I’m loving it!