Cognate Bitcrush

Cognate Bitcrush – a gritty, lo-fi sculptor for everything from 8-bit to digital destruction.

A tool for precisely dialling-in a wide range of digital artefacts including metallic glitches, aliasing, pixelated tones, crystal-like high-end and gated digi-fuzz.
Ramp down the sample rate to step up the aliasing and emulate 80’s samplers adding crunchy distortion. Sounds great swept with an expression pedal. Drop the bits and the bass becomes gritty and gated.

We wanted more. We added a unique Blocks mode that re-imagines JPEG lossy artefacts as a bass effect. Crank the block size to add a cleaner, sci-fi crunch. Use the Tone knob – a tilt eq, to shape the distortion, and Blend and Level to fit them into your bass sound. Go max blend for the full devastation, or dial it back to add a crisp edge and brightness to your tone.

Env follows the shape of your bass notes with the sample rate for more movement and dynamics, to create growls and zappy laser blasts. The LFO lets you tweak the sound further with smooth sine or random stepped modulation.
Just one more feature – a menu of carefully curated digital glitches, to twist the bits and bytes in unheard-of ways that interact with your bass signal for more unique digi-stortion.

Bassists love bit crushing for the bright, gnarly character and edge it brings to their tone. Add it after octaver for robotic synthiness, or add sizzle to overdrive. Give delays a 80’s retro throwback, or a crystal-like edge to pitch shifting.

Give Cognate Bitcrush a trial and discover a world of digi-stortion.

Channels

Mono in / mono out

CPU

1.1%

Version

1.30 · 07/07/2026

What's new

Glitch modes now switch with no level jumps.
Rate now extends to 20 kHz, allowing transparent sample rate while using glitches and bit crushing.

Manual

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