GROT in the mix

GROTBOX · 45 · 25 · 15 · −6.0 / 0.0

Place GROT after your bus compression. The dry signal underneath keeps the kick's weight and the cymbals' top, and the wet layer supplies the mid-forward battered-PA sound and, crucially, the driver slap on kicks and snares.

The slap is the reason to use GROTBOX here: at 45 it's just engaged, and tuned high enough to cut through the box's own midrange. If you can't hear it, raise DAMAGE a few points rather than the WET level.

DIRECT · 20 · 65 · 0 · 0.0 / −12.0

DIRECT so the mix keeps its extremes, the GROT knob doing the work. The bark and the low-mid compression add density and forward presence under the mix without the muddiness that most tape and tube emulations bring.

Keep WET low and bring it up until the mix feels closer, then back off a decibel. Watch the VU: if the damage reading is much past 50% you're probably past what a mix bus wants.

BOOMBOX · 30 · 55 · 0 · −3.0 / 0.0

BOOMBOX's 65 Hz port gives the low end weight, and the GROT knob generates the upper harmonics that let a small speaker imply a fundamental it can't reproduce. The dry path underneath keeps the real bottom for systems that can play it.

If the low end starts flapping in a way you don't want, pull TILT down a couple of decibels in the hidden panel, which gives the low bands less to work with.

DIRECT · 10 · 0 · 55 · −inf / 0.0

FILTH doing almost everything. This is the grime and noise floor of a neglected playback chain without imposing a cabinet on the source. Good on sampled instruments and soft synths that sound too new.

Push FILTH past 60 for something that reads as tape-adjacent, but keep DAMAGE low or the character stops being neglect and starts being breakage.

GROTBOX · 70 · 40 · 25 · 0.0 / −inf

Set it up with DRY at unity and WET muted, so the vocal is untouched. Then automate WET up to around −4.0 for the line you want destroyed, and back down.

Automating WET rather than the degradation knobs means the destruction arrives already at full character instead of sweeping through the knob's stages on the way in.

BOOMBOX · 85 · 80 · 50 · −inf / 0.0

Not subtle, and not meant to be. At 85 the driver is in terminal failure, and at 80 the chainsaw layer is well past halfway. BOOMBOX drives the breakup 40% harder than the other modes, so this is about as far as GROT goes.

Put a limiter after it.

GROTBOX · 60 · 60 · 30 · 0.0 / −6.0, sidechain OPEN, THRESH to taste

Key it from the kick. The bass or pad you've inserted it on stays clean between hits and tears apart on the beat, because the sidechain travels the DAMAGE, GROT and FILTH knobs together rather than ducking a level.

Swap to DUCK for the inverse: everything wrecked except where the key signal lands.

• Set MODE first. It changes how every other control behaves, so choosing it last means re-doing the others.
• Stage the input before pushing the knobs. If a source isn't breaking up, GAIN in the hidden panel is often the right control, not DAMAGE.
• Watch the meter, not your loudness impression. The internal level match makes very different settings sound similar in volume.
• Trim after, not with the faders. DRY and WET only cut. Use a gain plug-in after GROT to make up level.

GROT is cheap. Per channel it's a handful of biquads and some shapers running at a 32-sample control-rate grid, with no oversampling and no lookahead. Dozens of instances on a modern Mac present no difficulty, and there is no latency to compensate anywhere in a session.