Evil Clown
Evil Clown is a creative audio effect that turns any source into the unstable machinery of a broken, possessed sideshow. It combines distortion and broken-speaker character, mechanical pitch movement, dissonant resonances and evolving possession events, to make the source sound like one possessed mechanical instrument.
It is an audio effect, not a synthesizer or sampler; everything you hear is derived from the audio you feed it.
Controls
- SNARL
Pushes the source into a distorted, overdriven character with rasp, heavy breakup and a broken-speaker-like edge.
- LURCH
Makes the machine run badly. Turn it up for worn-motor wow, flutter, pitch drift and subtle left/right instability.
- CURSE
Adds moving dissonant shadows, inharmonic resonances and stronger possession events that emerge and recede over time.
- MIX
Blends the latency-matched dry signal with the complete processed signal using an equal-power crossfade. At 100, you hear only the processed path; at 0, you hear the latency-matched dry path.
- AMBER LAMP
The lamp in the upper-left corner is also the host-facing bypass control. Lit means active; dim means bypassed.
How it behaves
SNARL, LURCH and CURSE are three independent character controls, but they share motion internally so the result behaves like one unstable machine rather than three unrelated effects in series. Their ranges are intentionally front-loaded: useful character appears well before the top of each dial.
The movement and possession events use seeded randomness. The seed is stored with the plugin state so normal playback and offline bounce can reproduce the same evolving performance from the same starting point. Exact results can still depend on the host, transport position and rendering conditions.
MIX treats the wet path as a complete processed copy of the input, not only the extra sound created by the effect. This means Evil Clown does not become silent at 100 percent MIX when SNARL, LURCH and CURSE are all set to zero.
Evil Clown reports 24 ms of latency. The dry path is delayed by the same amount, so dry and wet stay aligned and the host can compensate correctly. It is mainly intended for mixing and creative production rather than latency-sensitive live monitoring. The plugin reports a two-second tail.
Bypass uses a short, click-free crossfade to that same latency-matched dry path. The DSP continues running while bypassed, so the reported latency, host delay compensation and the internal motion remain continuous when the effect is switched back on. The plugin's amber lamp and the host's bypass control operate the same parameter.
The plugin supports mono-to-mono and stereo-to-stereo processing.
Features
- SNARL, LURCH and CURSE character controls.
- Equal-power dry/wet MIX control.
- Distorted, overdriven character with rasp, heavy breakup and a broken-speaker-like edge.
- Slow wow, irregular drift and faster flutter.
- Evolving dissonant voices and possession events.
- Seeded, repeatable random movement.
- Mono and stereo operation.
- 24 ms reported latency.
- Internal double-precision DSP.
- VST3 for Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Audio Unit for macOS.
Installing
- macOS installer
Run Evil-Clown-<version>.pkg. VST3 and Audio Unit are both installed unless you click Customize and uncheck one.
- VST3 (Windows)
Copy Evil Clown.vst3 to C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
- VST3 (Linux)
Copy Evil Clown.vst3 to ~/.vst3/
Your host may need a plugin rescan or restart before Evil Clown appears. On macOS, Audio Unit hosts may also need their Audio Unit cache refreshed.
By installing or using Evil Clown you agree to the License terms.
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