NastyDLA

Excellent (Vintage) Delay with a lot of useful additional options. The manual describes the special features well. Best of all, it's free.

What can I say? This is a great plugin, and it is my # 1 plugin for creative play. It is very musical, whether shooting for huge and lush or dirty old lofi. Don't be ashamed of turning the noise knob up. If it sounds good, it is good. I have used NastyDLA on everything; guitar, synth, piano, drums, vocal, and yes, I have even put it across a mix. Just send a pulse through it, and you can get lost in the fun.

While NastyDLA is a delay device, calling this plugin only a delay would be silly. It is a saturator, an analog style chorus, a filter, a multi-mode analog style delay, and a noise generator (all at your discretion). For everything that is going on in this plugin, it is laid out very well, and it is a lot of fun to use. If you're strapped for cash, run your freebie samples and synths through NastyDLA, and bring them to life. You might be very surprised of what this thing can do, and I'm not exaggerating here.

One of my favorite things to do with NastyDLA is to treat it like an analog effect device by placing it in the input fx section of a track in Reaper so that playing with the knobs gets recorded in real time. Automation is fine for some things, but others are best left to exploring and finding unique sounds that can't be recalled.

Also check out the other great Variety Of Sound plugins. Bootsie, Patrick, and anyone else involved in the VOS plugins are saints to the audio community. These guys are pushing the envelope for plugins, and at the same time, they're sharing it with everyone for free.

For some time now, "Variety Of Sound" plugins became some of the most used plugins in my projects.

Good results, easy on CPU, easy to understand (and inspiring) GUI and some useful presets to get you started and all of this for free.

Sound - squeaky clean or colored, digital or tape, all possible.

Interface - all controls "in your face" with very clear labels, easy accessible and understandable. Metering display (which miss on many expensive plugins). Amazing inspiring design giving you a bit of extra "old skool" feel, pushing you to experiment and try out all the knobs and sliders.

Usability - can work on whatever you want. Voice, guitar, a bit of chorus on bass, synths, orchestral tracks, all possible. Quite small CPU consumption.

Highly recommended as all "Variety Of Sound" plugins.

Delays are really hard to get around. You see all that bilion dollars toys from big companies ... and can't stop yourself from thinking: Hey, does it REALLY needs that huge prices? I mean, it's just repeating for god's sake... Somtimes with some saturtaion or nonlinearity, but come on, just repeating!

For that purpose you have pretty good plugs in your DAW already and there is plenty of free ones. Problem with those is, that they are made either in SynthEdit, or coloration isn't nice, or it lacks some feature, or it's pain to operate. I know what you expect me to write right now: NastyDLA is exception and has none of those drawbacks! ...aaaand nope. It actually falls down to "lacks a feature" category. But rest of the delay is so awesome you won't need some payware stuff for a long time I swear.

It may look like I've got a little VOS obsession, but it's not that true. For example I'm not much fan of Epicverb. But this delay is absolute spot on. Normally you'd have one ping pong, one double mono, one tape delay plugin and so on. NastyDLA has one huge heavy knob and you can select any of those modes LIKE A BOSS! :)

It also features really cool processing of the feedback route. Really nice coloration. VOS's Tessla and Ferric are top of the freeware saturators, so you can expect this coloration is sweat. (But watch out to not overuse it. You don't hear saturated echoes in nature, do you?) Also chorus and modulation of the feedback signal. LP and HP filters that I think every delay should have. (!!!!!) Internal ducking. (!!!!!) Even adjustable background noise. Hard to imagine it more versatile than that.

Aaand the sound! If you go too much crazy you end up too oldschool, but when saturating and modulating gently, it sounds great, really bright and ... "positive", can't describe it properly, but it sounds cool.

Now what's the missing feature? Reverse! This is HUGE delay powerhouse. It's really sad it has no reversing. I'd be absolute killer with it. I mean ... there has to be some buffers inside that could be read backwards. :)

I know, I'm repeating myself, but I really wanted to give this baby a 10! Really did! ...but It's so close to perfection i need to give it a 9 and hope it punch VOS a bit to adding that function. :p

Anyway, download it! It's a order! er! er! er! r! r! r! r! r!

:)