Utikac Audio — VST3 / AU
Krntija
krn·ti·ya — Croatian, feminine noun. A car that should have been scrapped ten years ago.
Preamp and speaker emulation from six cars that would never pass inspection
Utikac Audio — VST3 / AU
krn·ti·ya — Croatian, feminine noun. A car that should have been scrapped ten years ago.
Preamp and speaker emulation from six cars that would never pass inspection
What it does
Every mix ends up in a car sooner or later. KRNTIJA.VI skips the part where you have to go outside, it runs your signal through the preamp, the paper cone and the rattling metal box of six cars that have done their kilometres.
It isn't a reverb and it isn't a bitcrusher. Each preset is a measured frequency response plus everything that comes with it: preamp saturation, clipping when the low end gets pushed, a slow wobble on the top, and a cabinet resonance that lets nothing through below its own limit.
Listen
See the effect:
The fleet
Every button in the plugin is one car. Responses were captured from the driver's seat, with everything the original had including the parts that had already stopped working.
190E (W201), 1985
One doctor owner, garage kept, full service history. The cleanest preset in the pack. Warm mids and highs that are somehow still alive.
1.6 D, 1989
Four speakers, two working. Boxed-in mids and a low end that stops dead at 120 Hz like it hit a wall. The best test of whether your mix survives the real world.
45, 1987
A cassette jammed in the deck in 1994 and stayed there. Crackly, mono, with a wobble on the top end that never quite settles. Vocals through this sound like a call from a petrol station.
EG hatchback, 1996
The sub in the boot is worth more than the car. Bass shoves everything else aside and clips the moment you push it, and the mids have left entirely. For an 808 that has to hurt.
318i, 1994
Tinted windows, tired speakers. The highs are muffled like someone threw a blanket over them, but the bottom still holds together. Good for taking the edge off a mix that's too bright.
Zastava 750, 1979
The narrowest band in the pack, essentially a telephone with an engine behind it. For when something has to sound like it's coming from another room, in another decade.
Controls
Four knobs, one switch and a row of buttons. Nothing is hidden in a menu, because the original didn't have menus either.
Picks the speaker and the character of the distortion. Yugo and Fico are the filthiest of the six; Merc and E36 stay closest to clean. Switching cars changes everything downstream, so start here.
How hard you push into the distortion. Turn it up and the signal gets more aggressive and starts to break up.
How wrecked the car is. Higher readings lose the top end and make the plastic rattle harder — the same speaker, twenty years further along.
Balance between the processed and the dry signal. At 100% everything goes through the car.
Output level. The needle dances along with it as a VU meter.
Turns the bad-contact crackle on and off. Off by default. The display prints CRACKLE ON or CRACKLE OFF when you flip it.
Installing
Krntija.vst3 into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3, AU into /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components