I found a Glitchmachines sale

[Starship Krupa]

https://www.pluginboutique.com/meta_product/1-Instruments/57-Complete-Collection/6335-Glitchmachines-Plugins

One of the periodic blowouts from one of my favorite plug-in houses. I'm upgrading Tactic to Tactic 2 and Quadrant to Quadrant 2.

If you're a fan of their work, the version 2's are usually worthy upgrades, especially at $10.

I find using their products to be a good exercise in letting go of the desire to understand and control every aspect of sound creation. They don't just reward experimentation, they demand it.

For those like me who get their products confused with each other, Tactic is sort of the drum machine (that's how I use it anyway, it's my breakdown-in-a-box) and Quadrant is the one with the virtual patch cables and 50 different modules you can arrange into any order in 12 slots.

I have every plug-in in their line-up except for Subvert, the "distortion," because my computers threatened to quit if I installed another distortion plug-in. I negotiated a special dispensation for bundles, but I don't want to anger them.

With these, I can take any sound and warp it entirely beyond recognition, and with some of the FX' presets, you don't even have to run sound into them, they oscillate enough on their own.

[Starship Krupa]

So, initial impressions of Tactic 2 based solely on browsing my way through the presets.

I have to say, I think I like the original Tactic presets better than the ones that come with Tactic 2.

They seem to be really into showing off how it now has reverb, delay, chorus, and filter effects modules that can be placed in buses in addition to the more glitch processing oriented options in the sequencer. They may be trying to do something for dub style processing. Every one of the presets I've checked so far uses at least two of these new bus effects.

Tactic 2 can do anything Tactic can do, obviously, because it's basically Tactic plus an fx bus with half a dozen modules. But since they have more to show off, it seems like the presets do that at the expense of the craziness that they got up to when limited to reverse and pan and so forth. The Tactic presets use panning a lot more, sounds ping-pong and pan around all over the place. The Tactic 2 presets keep things more down the center, with the sides filled in with the new modulation bus FX.

I guess what I'm saying is that if, like me, you sleep better at night knowing that you have the Glitchmachines collection, which will do more to warp sounds than you could ever possibly come up with ways to use, you should (and doubtlessly will) drop a couple of tenners to update two of their top of the line products. But with Glitchmachines, do not abandon the previous versions. You had one Tactic, which was the most amazing glitch breakdown in a box the world has seen, and now you have another Tactic, which is similar, and with more sounds. But you still have Tactic. It's like getting an artist's next album. No doubt there are people who cherish Hysteresis' original even weirder control layout. This isn't Ozone 10 and Ozone 11 we're talking about.

Preset quality is an important consideration because Glitchmachines' products rely heavily on presets to show the user what can be done. It's so difficult to work out how to get deliberate results with them. They're kind of unfathomable, which is a big part of their charm. I suspect that most users feel that they'll never get to the bottom of what they can do even with their simplest products, and that is a GOOD thing.