Stylust: Drum Break Designer Plugin by BeatSkillz

Stylust reduces bit depth and sample rate to add grit, darkness and aliasing. Its varispeed pitch-down runs in real time on the insert, lowering the playback by up to two octaves without a conventional pitch shifter, so the resulting artifacts come from the slowdown itself. BeatSkillz says transients stay locked to the beat during this process.

The tape and vinyl stage adds saturation, head bump, wow, flutter, drift and dropouts. Four drive types (Clean, American Pre, FET and Diode) and seven noise beds, including Stylus, Vinyl Dust, Tape Hiss and Cassette, cover a range of textures. A set of 20 convolution profiles adds further coloration, controlled with a depth parameter.

The X/Y pad moves the whole chain together, and the four macro knobs give one control per module. Every parameter is smoothed, so changes can be automated without clicks. Each module can also be opened for full control over its settings.

The compressor offers adjustable ratio, threshold, knee, attack and release, with automatic makeup gain, a pump mode, parallel mix and a sidechain high-pass filter. The enhance section provides a ten-band graphic EQ from 31 Hz to 16 kHz, plus air, bass, and width and mono bass controls. The intensity fader scales the full effect, which suits quick A/B comparisons and automation across a section. The plugin ships with 184 presets in 12 banks.