Stutter

Stutter is that rhythmic, glitchy chopping you hear when a sound is rapidly gated on and off in time with the beat. In Aconite it is not an effect you drop in the FX rack: it is a modulation source you route wherever you want the stutter to bite. That means “stutter” is a feel you paint onto a destination, not a fixed box in the chain.

There are four independent Stutter sources (Stutter 1–4), each on its own tempo-locked clock, so several can run at once: one chopping the output at 1/16, another wobbling the cutoff at 1/8, a third firing a rare glitch. Set them up like any other modulator, then wire them from the matrix or a right-click Add modulation on the destination you want them to chop.

What a Stutter does

Each Stutter emits a tempo-synced gate: a value that pulses between fully open and (partly or fully) closed, sliced into the note division you choose. On its own it does nothing audible; routed to a destination, its pulsing shape drives that control in rhythm.

The controls

• Rate — the tempo division of the stutter’s slices (1/8, 1/16, and so on). This sets how fast the gate chops.
• Shape — the edge of each slice, from a hard square (an abrupt on/off chop) through to a soft raised-cosine (a smooth, rounded gate that fades in and out rather than snapping).
• Depth — how far the gate closes: at 0 the gate never closes (the stutter is a no-op, so an unused source is silent), and at full it closes completely for a hard chop.
• Ratchet — accelerates the subdivision across each window, packing the slices tighter toward the end for a build-up / drum-roll feel.
• Chance — the probability that each individual slice fires. Below 100% some slices are skipped at random, so the pattern thins and varies instead of repeating identically every bar.
• Chance Rarity — a rarity divider on Chance, exactly like the mixer’s odds chip: it scales the firing odds down by ×1, 1-in-100, 1-in-1,000, 1-in-10,000, or 1-in-100,000, so you can dial in a slice that only stutters once in a long take.
• Trig — how the stutter’s window is triggered: Free (running continuously against the transport), Note (restarting on each note you play, so the chop aligns to your phrasing), or One-Shot (a single window that fires once and stops).

Where to route it: the two faces of stutter

Stutter has two natural destinations, and they give it its two characters:

• Output Gate — routing a Stutter to the master output gate chops the whole sound on and off in rhythm: the classic gated-pad / trance-gate stutter. It is de-clicked, so even a hard square shape never pops.
• Stutter Retrig — routing a Stutter to the retrigger destination re-articulates the sounding voices on each slice boundary, re-striking their envelopes so the sound stutters as a rapid re-attack rather than just a volume gate: the glitchy, buzzy re-articulation face. Oscillator and filter continuity are preserved, so it re-attacks without a click.

The destination reads which of the four engines drives it from its route’s source, so “Stutter 2 → Output Gate” chops with Stutter 2 while “Stutter 3 → Stutter Retrig” re-articulates on Stutter 3.

Of course, you are not limited to those two: because a Stutter is a plain modulation source, you can point it at cutoff, pan, an FX mix, or anything else in the matrix for rhythmic movement on that specific control.

A quick stutter

1. Play a sustained pad or hold a chord.
2. Open the matrix (or right-click the master output area) and route Stutter 1 → Output Gate.
3. Set Stutter 1’s Rate to 1/16 and raise Depth to full: the pad now chops in sixteenths.
4. Ease Shape up for a softer, breathing gate, or pull Chance below 100% so the pattern skips slices and stops sounding mechanical.
5. Add a second stutter on the cutoff at 1/8 for a layered, moving rhythm.

Every Stutter starts at Depth 0 (a no-op), so a fresh patch has no stutter until you dial one in and route it.