KVR Audio

No name · Post by **No name** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:14 am

Can someone explain a tape echo to me? Is it just a delay? Thanks!

Sicklecell666 · Post by **Sicklecell666** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:23 am

Shamann's the long wonded one, ask him..

The short answer is it's delay based on a tape reel, and imperfections in the tape drive can introduce all sorts of cool side-effects. If you want to see a pretty good VST equivelant, check out arcDev's Dubb Box, and be sure to read the manual, as it explains the functions pretty well.

ciao,
D

Sicklecell666 · Post by **Sicklecell666** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:24 am

Also, if you want to learn from the source, do a google search on the Roland Space Echo, arguably the best tape echo ever made.

greendoor · Post by **greendoor** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:35 am

The main feature about tape was that the sound lost it's high frequencies each time the tape loop went around, which actually sounds very cool. There are other small imperfections, such as wow & flutter (caused by subtle speed variations) and a generally fuzziness (caused by the loop of tape deteriorating). In my taste, I don't like too much of these imperfections. But I do like the sound of some slow modulation. My ideal "tape" delay rolls off the highs and the lows with each feedback, so the sound gets more band-passed as it decays. Strictly, that's caused by eq and not really intrinsic to a tape delay. But tape has a warmth and some compression that needs to be modeled with some saturation and/or compression to sound convincing in a plugin. I like the kjaerhus classic delay - it does digital, tape and analog in the same plugin. Don't confuse analog with tape - in many ways I prefer it. This refers to the analog "bucket-brigade" IC's that were used in pre-digital days. The consisted of thousands of FET transistors and capacitors on a single chip, and the sound was passed from each stage just like the bucket-brigade fire fighting method. They were very noisy, and the sound degraded very badly, which is why they sounded so cool. In real life, delays off building and mountains etc get very fuzzy. A digital delay is too perfect, but sometimes that's a great effect too.

No name · Post by **No name** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:36 am

Thanks!

No name · Post by **No name** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 1:58 am

What VST emulations are out there of a tape delay?

PeterL · Post by **PeterL** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 10:40 am

J_Starner wrote:What VST emulations are out there of a tape delay?

I think, the best one is bundled in Voxengo's AnalogFluxSuite.

help!