Super simple tempo synced delay plugin

[pbholmen]

Hi all

I'm trying to learn to sing. One challenge when doing that, is that we can't hear how we sound to the outside world. I can record and play it back, but that is tedious. So I had an idea: I want to set my DAW, with a backing track, in a loop. I want to sing one or more bars, and the second time around the loop, hear myself played back exactly as I sound. Then I can tweak the technique next time around the loop, and immediately hear the results, without clicking the mouse or stopping the music.

I thought a tempo synced delay with a long maximum time of a few bars might work for that. However, researching delay plugins it seems they are a bit too fancy: They have all kinds of analogue warmth and other fancy stuff to change the sound. For me, the best thing would be if they would just repeat EXACTLY what came in, sample by sample.

Do any of you know about a plugin that does exactly that? Other ideas on how to achieve what I described are greatly appreciated. DAWs I have access to include Logic, Bitwig and Ableton Live Lite.

The plugin better be cheap or free, as it's a very simple thing I'm asking for.

[whassup]

The delays in your DAWs should be able to do that.
If for whatever reason this is not the case you can get a free one in this bundle that can do that:
https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/

[osiris]

Sonimus does a good one called DelaySon that can do this.
https://sonimus.com

[pbholmen]

Thanks. I should perhaps add that I'd hope to do it with Ableton Live Lite and not the two DAWs mentioned, because I only have the two others installed on my main workstation (a mac), and not on my laptop which has less storage and that is the one I bring to practice. Can't practice in my own apartment as the neighbours hear every sound.

The built-in delays in the three DAWs mentioned do seem to colour the sound. When I try to null, disabling every option to filter and colour the sound, there's still quite a bit of sound left, so it doesn't just repeat sample by sample. Maybe I'm being to nerdy about it and should just accept that the colouring is very subtle.

The reaplugs linked above seem to be Windows only, and for outdated versions of it.

[Ah_Dziz]

Just go get the latest reaplugs from the reaper site. The delay will do what you want. You could also setup your phone as a Bluetooth controller for your daw and turn the recording off and on from wherever you're recording while in loop mode. Using the daw is the most straightforward way to do this in my opinion.

[Dirk Diggler]

Use Reaper and just use the built in take system.
You can go through your loop as many times as you like and it saves all the overdubs.

Kenny explains things very well.

Much easier than trying to do it with a delay I think.
I suppose another option would be using a looper like Mobius or MSuperlooper.

[PTV]

you can't get simpler than that:
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/delay-by-socalabs

[pbholmen]

Thanks to you all.

I didn't explain properly that this was meant for practicing, not for recording. Comping, as the video posted above explains for Reaper, is great for recording and producing, not so great for practicing. When you practice a guitar, you can immediately hear if a string is buzzing, because what you hear is what other people hear. When singing, you can't hear what other people hear other than by recording yourself, and that gets tedious, you don't get the immediacy of feedback you get with other instruments.

Being the big NERD I am, I went ahead and coded the whole thing in JUCE. With it, I could add a nifty feature which automatically sets the delay time equal to the loop markers in the DAW. That's perfect, I don't even have to figure out the BPM of the backing track, and the song can have varying BPM with no issue. I'm probably not gonna publish it, cause I would need to do code signing and probably maintain and read bug reports etc... I won't bother with that. Thanks anyway.

[thecontrolcentre]

Have you considered using a looper rather than a delay for this task? Or another option (as you have Live) would be to record your vocal into a clip in Session View. You could then trigger that as needed, without having to stop and re-start the track ...

Looks like you already have your solution ^^

[zerocrossing]

You're definitely looking for a looper. Ableton has a plugin called Looper that will do exactly what you want, plus other tempo synced delays. I'm not sure if the "lite" version has it.

If not, there's a free plugin called Mobius that will do the trick, plus a lot more. It's a lot, though. Made to do a lot more, but once you set it up, it's as simple as can be to use. You don't have to use more of it than you need, and it's very customizable.

[pbholmen]

Thanks for the tip on a looper. I will definitely check it out. I have only barely used loopers in the past, a hardware looper pedal that needed to be controlled by the foot. If the plugins work anything like that looper pedal, I probably would need some hardware controller pedal to control it, to get the most out of it. I didn't find a looper in Ableton's Lite version, but I'm sure there are plenty of cheap third party plugins.

Meanwhile, I consider my problem solved, although a looper might turn out to be even better than what I have now.