Last night I started looking around for plug-ins that effectively destroy my drum loops. Beat Repeat inside Live is okay, but I wanted something to really mangle my loops. To my luck, I found a thread on the Ableton forums regarding this very subject.

A lot of people recommended free VSTs and that kind of thing, but somebody recommended this plug-in called Major Malfunction. After downloading the demo and losing two hours to this thing, I decided I had to buy it. It’s a mere $25, but if you’re not convinced, visit the site and get the demo. Granted, like some other demos out there, you’ll hear a tone every minute or so, but it’s fully-function able otherwise.

This plug-in is CLEARLY programmed in Max/MSP which I personally like. I love the layout and the feature-set which include:

• A master volume, wet/dry knob, and a grid control (can make your grid from 1 to 64)
• A band-pass, lo-pass, or hi-pass filter that sounds pretty good
• 10 different effects: retrigger, reverse, degrade, gate, delay, distort, vocode, silence, slow, and pass. It also features a “random” effect that will randomly choose an effect when triggered on the grid
• The ability to save up to 4 presets for each effect (ie. 4 presets for reverse, 4 for delay, etc) and up to 8 master presets (think of it like saving a session inside Malfunction)

But enough talk, let’s listen to what the effects sound like. I programmed a few drums loops and ran them thru each effect (Sans silence and pass) and uploaded the wav files.

First, lets hear the drums without any sort of processing:

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Retriggered:

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Reversed:

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Degraded:

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Gated:

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Distorted:

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Vocoded:

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Randomized:

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The plug-in sounds good. And I don’t have too many gripes with the program. However, it would be swell of the developers to implement a MIDI mapping feature in this thing. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing like that built-into the plug-in. It’s not a total deal breaker, but when you’re performing live with a MIDI controller, it’s nice to not have to touch your laptop’s trackpad to change effects.

What may be a dealbreaker to most is that this plug-in is only for Ableton Live and will only run on a Mac. It comes as an Audio Unit plug-in so you could give it a shot inside Logic (or any other DAW that supports the AU format), but the developers caution you that it may not work to it’s fullest potential.

All-in-all, this is a solid sound mangling utility. Matched up with Beat Repeat, you’re destined to really fuck your sounds up. If you’re using Live as your main platform for production, give the demo a shot.

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