Glitch 2 Is Now Free: A Tribute to Kieran Foster

Ned Rush pays tribute to Kieran Foster, developer of the iconic Glitch 2 VST, now available for free, and explores the plugin live in this heartfelt livestream.

Glitch 2, one of the most influential glitch and stutter effect plugins in electronic music history, is now available for free. Its developer, Kieran Foster, passed away in mid-2025, and in his memory the plugin has been made free to download for anyone who wants it. Ned Rush, who knew Kieran personally, dedicated this livestream to exploring the plugin and reflecting on the mark it left on a generation of producers.

What Glitch 2 Does

Glitch 2 is a sequenced multi-effect VST built around the idea of chaining and randomising audio destruction effects in time with your music. At its core, you get a bank of effects including stutters, retriggers, tape stops, bit crushers, modulators, and stretches, each available on its own tab and arrangeable in any order you choose.

Each effect slot can be step-sequenced independently, meaning you can programme exactly when each type of mangling fires within a bar or phrase. The random mode lets you step-sequence the randomness itself, so you can sketch in moments of chaos while keeping a sense of rhythmic intention underneath. Multiple instances running simultaneously, slightly offset from one another, is the approach Ned favours here, creating a layered glitch texture that does not collapse into a single recognisable grid pattern.

The plugin sits in a lineage that stretches back to the original Glitch VST from around 2005, which arrived at a moment when IDM, glitch, and breakcore were filtering out from specialist internet communities into wider electronic music production. Glitch 2 refined that concept substantially, added Mac support, and extended the toolset in ways that have since shaped the sound of countless records, film soundtracks, and game audio, whether producers knew they were hearing it or not.

How to Use It

• Load the plugin on any audio channel, loop, or break, then set the beat division and bar length to match your session tempo.
• Turn off Random on Load in settings if you want to start from a clean slate rather than a pre-randomised state.
• Select an effect tab such as Stretch, Retrigger, or Modulator, and draw in active steps across the grid to determine when that effect fires.
• Use the Random mode with a reduced division count to step-sequence bursts of randomised effect selection, giving you controlled unpredictability across a phrase.
• Reorder effect tabs by dragging them into a different sequence within a scene, which changes the signal chain and produces markedly different results from the same step pattern.
• Run multiple instances of Glitch 2 on the same source, each with different grid offsets and effect selections, so the mangling does not lock to one predictable rhythmic position.
• Automate or use LFOs where your host allows to shift effect parameters over time, moving beyond static step patterns into something that evolves across a full arrangement.

Why It Matters

Glitch 2 arrived at a point when the techniques it automated were considered the secret currency of a particular strand of forward-thinking electronic music. The debate around whether a plugin like this made things too easy now reads as a precise rehearsal of arguments being had about AI tools today. What Kieran Foster actually did was put a genuinely powerful creative instrument in the hands of anyone who wanted it, and the breadth of music shaped by that decision over the past two decades is difficult to overstate. Making it free in his memory is a fitting conclusion to that story, and the least we can do is use it well.