What is VCB?

VCB stands for Virtual Circuit Bending—our way of taking the raw chaos of hardware circuit bending and rebuilding it inside software.

Circuit bending was pioneered by Reed Ghazala in the late 1960s. He coined the very term circuit bending after accidentally shorting out a toy amplifier and discovering it could create strange, otherworldly sounds. That accident sparked a whole movement of experimental sound design, and we owe everything to this man. Without Ghazala’s fearless curiosity, the art of breaking machines to discover their hidden voices might never have existed.

Circuit bending is the art of hacking electronics—kids’ toys, cassette players, samplers, phasers—and forcing them to misbehave. You short out circuits, swap wires, scrape tape with sandpaper, and suddenly you’ve got sounds no engineer ever intended: glitches, stutters, squeals, alien melodies, and beautiful broken noise. It’s unpredictable, destructive, and alive.

For years we bent hardware by hand, breaking hundreds of toys and pulling apart gear just to hear what would happen. We didn’t stop there—we used spectrometers, oscilloscopes, and other analysis tools to measure what made those broken circuits so special. We studied the strange waveforms, chaotic frequency spikes, and unexpected harmonics that come from failure itself, then translated that data into digital algorithms.

Meanwhile, most plugins were getting shinier, cleaner, and more obsessed with vintage emulation. None of them captured the spirit of playful destruction.

That’s why we created VCB—a design philosophy and technology with our modeling technology  DMT (Destroy Modeling Technology) .Instead of emulating old studio gear, our plugins model failure: skips, glitches, rewinds, rewired circuitry, and the sonic accidents that only broken machines can produce. They don’t just process your sound; they bend it until it feels unstable, unpredictable, and alive again.

With VCB, you get:

  • Authentic chaos – algorithms inspired by real-world bent circuits.
  • Playable unpredictability – glitch, destruction, and mutation you can actually control.
  • Infinite possibilities – because in software, we can bend things hardware never could.

    VCB isn’t about accuracy. It’s about finding beauty in the broken.