Shake n' Bake Your Own Glitches

Glitch effects are more popular than ever these days. They used to be restricted mainly to obscure IDM acts that only you and three of your friends know about, but nowadays, glitching can be heard in electro-house and all manner of other more accessible electronic dance music.

Simply put, glitches are errors in digital media playback. There are tons of glitch-oriented plug-ins out there, many of them free, but have you ever tried making your own the old fashioned way?

The easiest way to do this is to record some sounds or music to a CD-R. It doesn't have to be anything in particular, but give yourself a pretty wide choice of different types of sounds to give yourself access to different sounding glitches.

Now that you've burned your CD, it's time for the fun part. We want to mess up the surface of the CD pretty good to cause those playback errors. Get some sandpaper, cutlery, or even a big sandwich bag filled with gravel, roofing nails, or other hard, scratchy things and give it a few good shakes. It might take some experimentation to find the proper amount of roughing up. Too few, and you'll have to sit around forever to find the good glitches. Too many and it might not play back at all.

Once you've shown your CD-R who's boss, hook up your CD player to your soundcard (or hardware sampler), press play, and record the results. If you have access to an older CD player, these are often more prone to digital errors, although extremely old ones might not play CD-R's. Load it up in your audio editor of choice and pick out all the best stutters and digital coughs and before you know it, you'll have a whole kit of weird digital artifacts to spice up your tracks with. And the best part? You did it old school, baby!