Looking for the cruelest, harshest distortion plugin

[Halonmusic]

Gorgon
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/gorgon ... ar-display

I love Gorgon.

yes.

[ScrLk]

^ have you ever tried the mix:analog ADU? it's something else.

I was thinking the same thing!

[Ah_Dziz]

Firstly there is a freeware effect from SE superdestroyfx that has a button called "implode" or something. It sounds like it converts the signal to either full positive or full negative and nothing in between (that's based of listening to it not any actual info). That's the fastest way to completely insanely distorted as fudge madness that I have in my plugin folder. However anything with a freely drawable waveshaper is capable of doing "horrible things" to sound.
Melda has a free one (also a multiband not free one). This is the most straightforward and flexible way to destroy your audio waveform and can do everything from gentle softclipping to insane bitcrushing and then it can all be modulated based on the input envelope or the pitch or other stuff (Melda does this with all their stuff). There are some more complicated things for bit manipulation (Melda has one of these too not sure if it's free though) and they can do silly type stuff especially when they manipulate the two parts of the floating point signal separately in interesting ways.

I'd stick with Mwaveshaper or any other freely drawable waveshaper that doesn't curve the transfer function.

Moving forward, Ohmicide is still an amazing distortion box and is capable of really crazy stuff with it's tons of modes some of which do interesting time based or pitch based things on top of just distorting things. Add to that the fact that it's multiband and has feedback per band and also has a full octave of snapshots that can all have completely different settings makes it a close contender. If you can only have one I'd recommend Melda MwaveshaperMB, but either one should make you a happy camper for batshitcrazy distortion.

JJ

Edit: DFX polarizer is the freeware from smartelectronix I was referring to above. Also their geometer plugin is a fun wave manipulation plugin. I dunno how these hold up on non windows rigs, but they run fine in all my hosts still.

[Danilo Villanova]

Cruelest and harshest would be a high gain metal amp sim without a cab sim.

[dionenoid]

Distocore DistoFX.

+ 1

For sure the most extreme of them all.

Other contestants would be Audio Damage Kombinat Tri, Sugar Bytes Wow2 and Izotope Trash2.

[Ah_Dziz]

Oh damn, Voxengo boogex can get super crazy also. The old version had presets that showed this off very well. It's worth a go.