In this video I’m exploring spectral resynthesis using the Electro-Harmonix Atomic Cluster, which they call a “spectral decomposer” (a description that tells you basically nothing until you hear it). I demo it on a saw wave first, because it makes the whole spectrum obvious: to my ears it immediately feels like a low-pass around ~5 kHz, but the interesting part is how it behaves below that point. My working theory is it splits the incoming audio into tiny frequency bins, analyzes the level of each bin, and then re-synthesizes them as a stack of little sine waves. The Atoms knob basically decides how many of those bins you’re allowed to hear (from highs down to the root), and Speed controls how fast it reacts—slow speed gets you that blurred, smeary, underwater MP3-ish vibe I’m obsessed with. I also compare it to spectral plugins (spectral gate and MP3/lossy-style effects) and explain why the pedal feels different: it reacts to what I’m playing and doesn’t just mute everything when the signal drops under a threshold. Then I record a bunch of live instruments and synths (pads, granular clicky stuff, plus phasers/flangers to confuse the harmonic tracking), run everything through the Atomic Cluster, and resample the results. Finally, I push it further by feeding reverb/delay into the pedal, and then turning those recordings into presets in Serum 2 and Pigments—pads, flutes, zaps, unstable scans, granular/vocoder weirdness, and a few “how is this still musical?” patches. All the samples/presets from the session are bundled into a Patreon pack (with a free sampler tier).