MUTRONICS MUTATOR: THAT 90s FILTER

video upload by Alex Ball

"A look at the Mutronics Mutator released in 1996.

As discussed in the video, this unit was used by many famous artists, producers and engineers in the late 90s and early 00s across a broad range of styles.

The Mutator is a stereo pair of analogue, resonant low pass filters (SSM 2045s) and voltage controlled amplifiers that are contoured by envelope followers and/or LFOs. In a nutshell, that allows for all sorts of stereo filtering, sweeping and tremolo FX on an open-ended number of audio sources. There is further functionality such as additional attack and release times, external inputs for creating alternate envelopes, external CV ins, LFO linking/inverting, MIDI control and MIDI LFO reset etc. Most (but not all) of this was used at some point in the video.

0:00 Intro Jam
0:59 The Mutronics Mutator
2:04 Demo 1: Borrowed Filters
2:46 Radiohead and More
4:01 Demo 2: Crutator
5:06 Envelope Followers
6:03 Demo 3: Beat Guitar
6:45 Across a mix
7:01 Demo 4: Daft Filtering
8:14 What happened to the Mutator?
9:04 Demo 5: Does It Funk Though?
9:55 How do we get the sound now?
11:10 Summary"