MOTION ARTIFACT

Inspired by imaging problems in microscopy, Motion Artifact is a signal degrader that imposes instability and distortion along several tone dimensions. It feels like a post-processing studio effect but lives on your pedalboard, where it is highly responsive to upstream drive and melts into downstream delay and reverb.

It's built around three optical stages that destabilize warmly saturated tones.

DRIFT is a shared random walk that modulates all of the stages, going from woozy to lurching.

WARP adds a subtle, uneven sway across an all-pass filter.

JITTER puts a tremble over a low-pass, from a warbling tape decay to a band-limited tremolo.

GLITCH drops the signal out, like a machine with a bad bearing.

GAMMA runs the drive from a soft thickening to raspy and worn, OPACITY crossfades between the dry and the degraded signals, and LEVEL sets the output.