Stylust

Stylust

Drum Break Designer

Feed it a clean kit — get back a break. Sampled down to 12 bits, run to tape, cut to vinyl and squashed on the way out: the whole chain that made those records, in one plugin.

Your Drums Sound Too Clean

The breaks everyone chases were never recorded clean. They went to tape, got cut to vinyl, were sampled into a 12-bit box with barely any headroom, pitched to fit, then squashed on the way out. Every stage took something away — and that is exactly what made them hit.

Stylust is that whole chain in one plugin. Drop it on a stock kit, a drum machine loop or a clean one-shot, and get a break that sounds like it came off a record.

Dial It In By Ear

You should not need to understand four modules to get a sound. Drag one point on the X/Y pad and the whole chain moves with it — grit against warmth, clean against destroyed. Find the spot that feels right and stop.

• Instant — one gesture reaches every module at once
• Intensity fader — scales the entire effect from a whisper to full damage
• Four macro knobs — one per module when you want a little more control
• Nothing clicks — every parameter is smoothed, so you can automate and perform it

Shallow To Deep

Four knobs across the front, one per module. That is the whole plugin if you want it to be — turn them up until the drums sound like a record.

Then open any module and every control underneath is yours. Same plugin, two depths: fast when you are writing, surgical when you are finishing.

Pitch It Down Like The Box

This is the sound people buy old samplers to get. Pitching down on the hardware never shifted the pitch — it slowed the playback, and everything came with it: the aliasing, the darkening, the thickened attack. Stylust does the same thing, in real time, on the insert.

• Two octaves down — true varispeed, not a pitch shifter, so the grit is the real thing
• Transients stay put — every hit lands on the beat with its attack intact
• Bit depth — from clean down to the gritty low-resolution sound
• Sample rate — darker and dirtier as it drops, with the aliasing left in
• Input filter & drive — shape and push what hits the converter

No bounce, pitch, re-import

A pitch shifter fakes it and smears the attack. A tape or sampler slows everything and the groove drifts. Stylust runs varispeed between hits and re-locks on every transient, so a break drops two octaves without flamming, doubling or losing its front end.

So you dial it while the track plays, instead of bouncing a stem, loading it into a sampler, pitching it and importing it back.

Tape + Vinyl

Where the movement comes from. Tape saturation and head bump, then the record itself — wow and flutter, drift, dropouts and the surface noise of a deck that has been played a few hundred times.

• Wow, flutter & drift — from barely-there sway to fully warped
• Dropout — the momentary losses of worn tape
• Four drive types — Clean, American Pre, FET and Diode
• Seven noise beds — Stylus, Vinyl Dust, Vinyl Warm, Vinyl Busy, Tape, Tape Hiss, Cassette
• 20 convolution profiles — with a true depth control, not a wet/dry blend

Compression With Attitude

Squash it until it breathes. Full control over ratio, threshold, knee, attack and release, with automatic makeup so the level comes straight back up no matter how hard you push it.

• Pump mode — lets the release move the track instead of hiding it
• Parallel mix — keep the transient, add the weight underneath
• Sidechain high-pass — stop the kick from ducking everything
• Soft to hard knee — gentle glue or full flat-top squash

Put It Back

Everything before this takes something away. Enhance is where you decide what comes back — a ten-band EQ to shape it, then air, weight and width to make it sit in the track.

• Ten-band graphic EQ — 31 Hz to 16 kHz, harsh or sweet, your call
• Air — top end back on top of a dulled sample
• Bass — low-end weight without mud
• Width & mono bass — open the stereo image, keep the bottom centred

How Much Damage?

Intensity scales the entire chain at once. Set the character you want, then use this one fader to decide how far it goes — a gentle tint on a finished mix, or completely destroyed on a loop.

It is the fastest way to A/B a sound against the track, and it automates cleanly if you want the effect to build across a section.

184 Presets. 12 Banks.

Built to be used, not just demoed. Every bank is a different job — from a light tape tint you would leave on a master, to settings that barely survive the trip.