A distortion you can play

A front panel worth stealing

I knew from the start I wasn't going to emulate one device. What I wanted was the arrangement of one: a high-gain amplifier, a resonant filter and a feedback control, all within reach on the same front panel. That layout came from a measuring instrument.

The Rohde & Schwarz UBM is 1950s test equipment, all tubes, built to measure rather than to make anything. Karlheinz Stockhausen had one at the WDR studio in Cologne. Judging by the session photos, he was rather fond of it.

Mine came through Hainbach. I'd pointed him at some microphones and preamps a while back, gear he still uses most days, and he returned the favour by putting me in touch with a friend selling a UBM. It was mostly working, like all equipment from this era. A couple of months at the tech's, and Brut started.

Looking for the worst case scenario

Over the years I've put together a rather esoteric collection of equipment, most of it from the 1950s, the tube golden age. None of it was built to saturate. The engineers were chasing clean, and the people running it were trained to stay out of the red. Push any of it past where it was meant to go and it turns into something worth keeping, or into nothing at all. Six of them turned the right way.

The RCA OP-6 came from Nils Frahm, and it ran on his records before it arrived here. It's what I reach for when a source needs to step out of the speakers: the mix bus, vocals, acoustic instruments of any kind. Somehow it sounds as though it was already EQed, so I put it across the master and work between the Drive and Mix knobs.

The Radiometer Copenhagen BKF6 is similar, but subtler. Made in Denmark in the 1950s to measure distortion, it happens to be excellent at producing it.

Six units that agree on nothing

The Girardin is a small French broadcast mixer from the 1960s, running on early germanium transistors. I keep the hardware wired as a synth mixer before anything reaches the interface, and it earns its place there every day. I'm told it's the one guitar players go straight for. I wouldn't know.

The Polivoks I have a complicated history with. I've owned three (never at the same time, I woudln't be able to afford that) because I keep selling them and buying them back. The panel scaling drives me up the wall: the filter does everything in the first 10% of its travel, then it's different flavours of open. The Polivoks that made it to Brut is the last Polivoks Analogia ever serviced. They don't take them on any more.

Then the NRU tube mixer, with its beautiful brutalist look. My tech wasn't happy when it arrived: because of how it was stored, it smelled like cat piss. Thankfully it didn't sound like it. Something dark and dirty, a Nine Inch Nails vibe? NRU it.

And the UBM, which started all this and turned out to be the odd one out. Drums and synths, mostly. It's the only one that needs its own filter behind it to make sense, which is where the second half of the plugin comes in.

A design with infinite possibilities is no design at all

Six units, then, and not sixty. Six options beat six hundred every time. The work was never in gathering more of them. It was in deciding which six.

The saturation is captured from the hardware itself, with a method I spent about a year developing alongside Kolor and the upcoming modular synthesizer plugin. More on that approach here.

The filters came out of the synth. I'd built a dynamic sampling method for it, and Brut is where I refined it, because these filters had to track the units exactly. It isn't only the curves. The little plick-plong you get when you run a short impulse into one is arguably the least reasonable thing to tune an instrument to, and it took months to get right.

The filters complete the picture

When I first heard the UBM preamp, it didn't impress. On its own it loses a good part of the bottom end. The secret to a full-range response is the filter.

It's a resonant highpass with a peak at the cutoff so strong it can almost pass for a bandpass. Set the cutoff low and the bass gets its bloom back. The two were designed for each other, and they behave the same way in the plugin.

The Polivoks bandpass is a different animal. Wired inside Brut's feedback loop, it sings. This is where things stop resembling what you put in: focus it on a resonance, push the feedback up, put a little reverb after it, and whatever you fed the plugin comes out as something else. That side of Brut owes a lot to the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, and that's about attitude, not whether they had a Polivoks in there (they didn't).

Setting the ranges

With every preamp and filter combination, and a feedback loop running the output back into the input, everything touches everything. What sings on one preamp screams on another. There's no way to set that up on paper.

Two things took ages. Internal gain staging, which decides not only how much it breaks up but how it responds across the spectrum. And the range of every knob, the part nobody notices and everybody feels. A control should pay off along its whole travel. If the top third of the feedback knob is unusable, the knob is wrong, not the player.

Play, adjust, play again, across every combination, until the same gesture is worth making wherever you are in the plugin. At that point you're not building a circuit. You're tuning something until it answers back.

Don't lose your head, it's saturation

Most days Brut is a mix tool for me. One preamp across the master or a group, not much of it, and everything sounds bigger and somehow more real. There's a Klangfilm RZ062a at the end of the chain for exactly this, the tilt section of a 1950s tube mastering EQ, wired in last so you can take the edge off or open the top up after the damage is done.

I was recently working on a short animation for a festival, and when I played the track to my wife, she immediately noticed one sound. "What's that?" she asked. "That sound of the thunder rolling in the distance?". It wasn't a thunder. It was a timpani roll, decinmated with Brut, and pushed into a plate reverb. So yeah, between the subtle mix warming, and a thunderstorm, there seems to be some range to these three dials.

Other days you throw something ordinary at it, a drum loop or a piano take, push the feedback past polite, and wait to hear what comes back. It begins innocently. Suddenly it's 3 AM.

The trial runs on your own tracks, free, with no time limit. Find out how late it keeps you.

I'm so sorry for making this plugin.