Colour Copy as good as Strymon TIMELINE?

[bbtr]

In short: if Coco doesn't work for a particular sound, that's ok. It's clearly not built to be the be-all-end-all delay plugin. No need to get worked up one way or the other. It's an excellent product for what it does.

+1

Warmonger should replace the Dune leads with violins, pads with organs, kick drum with C2 piano note and kabbakabbakabba with a cello, use profuse amounts of CoCo, Objeq delay, Satin, then put the whole lot in physically simulated space like VSS 3, then call it full-on.

[robbmonn]

It's a good plugin. I've been experimenting with using it at 20-30% wet on the mixbus of a project before Acustica's Water compressor and it is doing something really, really marvelous, and fwiw, somehow has taken a problematic, can't get it to stick together mix that I've been stuck on for weeks and gotten it close to bounce-ready.

I think that what I am loving about it would get lost on channel inserts. The Zoviet France comment is right on... this delay is deep enough to make it the instrument.

[Russell Grand]

Not sure how much of it is the usual u-he hype here though.

Definitely some u-he hype IMO...

[Russell Grand]

Yes I do, now get off my lawn.

[dangayle]

I can't actually think of any music beyond dub where the delay sound is prominent enough for the quality of it to be appreciated in and of itself as a significant component of the track and/or genre. Even when I listen to artists like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream who employed delay quite heavily, I enjoy and appreciate the effect of delay rather than the quality of the delay itself. Maybe it's just the case that all the various parts are of such high quality that I'd only notice if something was bad. I think it's the same for reverb too.

I dunno, if you replace the delay in David Gilmour’s (Pink Floyd) pre-Dark Side of the Moon rig, there’s no way it sounds the same. Or if you swap out The Edge’s Memory Man. Sure, you’ll get something that still sounds cool, but it would be a lot different.

[foosnark]

I can't actually think of any music beyond dub where the delay sound is prominent enough for the quality of it to be appreciated in and of itself as a significant component of the track and/or genre.

It's as much down to the musician as the genre. The sound characteristics of a delay matter to me VERY much for the music that I make. It's not just a simple time-synched echo, or the basis of a chorus or flanger type of effect. It's something that contributes to the texture of the music. I often layer different delays, longer and shorter, in the same voice.

Typically I use high feedback and a lowish mix level. EQ/filtering, saturation, sample rate, bit depth, noise (including BBD clock noise), breakups at longer delay times (like the PT2399 delay), diffusion, modulation (in terms of clock steadiness as well as random or periodic warble) and other coloration absolutely do matter, as they determine the kind of "bed" I'm going to get out of it.

In a modular environment (and still somewhat possible in a DAW) really short, clean, steady delays can do Karplus-Strong synthesis, FM-like phase modulation, and comb filtering. Clean, DC-coupled delays with no feedback can be applied to control signals (or with feedback if you want madness).

Think of it like this: at a rock show, how many people in the audience care about what kind of guitar, strings and amp the lead guitarist is using? But to the guitarist it might make a huge difference, affecting both playing style and sound.

I quite like Colour Copy for the flexible routing, the extremely smooth modulation, the flexible and great-sounding coloring and saturation, and the ducking (especially feedback mode).

I like Echobode, not just for the pitch shifting (though small shifts in ringmod mode make a nice tremolo) but the "Smear" diffusion and the shelving EQ.

I like EchoMelt for the less predictable warbling and lo-fi bandpass type effects, but often feel like I can't get the delay section to do what I want, so it's more situational.

Permut8 is full of weird noisy glitchy strangeness and I don't fully understand it, and that's okay. Sometimes it gives me something I didn't know I wanted.

Ratshack Reverb emulates a specific 80s BBD delay that has a psychedelic and dubby vibe I often want; it's like the delay version of a spring reverb. I don't think I can imitate it exactly on Colour Copy, even without the "mic input" distortion.

I thought about dumping Replika, but the Diffusion mode is good for creating background washy stuff and it's got some other tricks up its sleeve.

Likewise I basically never use Sandman for standard delay stuff, but a lot of its features can be heavily abused in ways that don't (or do) sound like a delay.

I'm probably going to love the Valhalla delay; I understand it's more tape-like and I don't have a really good, full-of-character tape delay.