Published
Sat, May 27, 2023, 15:00
- The Dirt Magnet is an attempt to make the noisiest sound processor on the market.
French firm Finegear has a new FX board coming up.
It's an all-analogue crackle machine that features a real tape delay, two LFOs, a ring modulator and a filter modelled on Korg's MS-20. Essentially, it's a large, expensive machine that will make your music productions sound warped, badly recorded and alive with texture.
At the heart of the Dirt Magnet is an analogue tape delay. Like the oldest delay FX ever produced, it records sound onto a piece of eighth-inch cassette tape and then plays it back at a delay from the main signal. The fascination with this technique is because the tape itself is such a crunchy medium, which ages and warps the sound it receives. As the same piece of tape is used over and over again every time you send sound through it, it also becomes progressively worse at faithfully representing whatever it records.
The imperfections that this introduces to sounds are now highly prized for the character they give to delayed signals. But Finegear's Dirt Magnet also offers other analogue FX, including a crackle generator (which does exactly what you imagine), two LFOs that are syncable over CV and MIDI, and a ring modulator, which takes two sounds and uses one to modulate the other, creating harsh, metallic noises.
Finegear, a small French company based in Paris, also recently announced a modular mixer, the Modmix, which is similarly noisy and designed more as an instrument than a sound processor.
Watch a video about the Dirt Magnet.
Orders are open now for both the Dirt Magnet (€1,428) and the Modmix (€1,547). More info below.