Yeah like the dalai said, you can route audio straight through 404 and effect it real-time. It’s a cool box for that. A lot of options. Quick to flick through them and see if anything fits. The pitch and chromatic fx (separate from the vinyl sim) can lead to cool things too. Between them they have dry/wet and feedback etc. Very cool for lofi weirdness.
Deco is better quality/more authentic for strictly tape stuff but the 404 does a lot of other stuff too that makes it hard to choose which to recommend overall. I’ll try to do those recordings for you tonight and maybe that’ll help me to say/you to know.
What exactly do you mean when you say “warble”? Do you want to simulate the pitch fluctuation effect of playing back tape that’s not running at constant speed, or do you want a “tape sound” in general?
Tremelo pedals are normally just a volume effect tho right?
Which is confusing I guess considering a tremelo arm on a guitar is pitch…
Behringer do a cheap vibrato pedal that I took a gamble on. It’s vaguely ballpark but doesn’t really cut it at all compared to other pedals or the 404 vinyl sim.
Diamond make a vibrato pedal that apparently does a good job. Tame impala lonerism LP is smothered in it apparently. There are a few others too. All Expensive tho and I chose the Warped Vinyl out of the bunch in the end. Amazing pedal…
Tremolo, in electronics, is the variation in amplitude of sound achieved through electronic means, sometimes mistakenly called vibrato, and producing a sound somewhat reminiscent of flanging, referred to as an “underwater effect”. A variety of means are available to achieve the effect.
Tremolo (electronic effect) - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki › Trem…
I should add that in general adding a tremolo or vibrato effect after a synth doesn’t make much sense as you can route an LFO to pitch or level on most synths…
Having said that, the way tremolo is implemented in analogue pedals can make them sound pretty interesting.
Besides not being able to run whole mixes through it, an Lfo sometimes works OK for the pitch side of approximating the wonky tape sound but (depending on the synth) the lfo often won’t dial in quite right due to one reason or another (shape/speed/trig options etc) or you might have run out of lfos using them on other duties. And the Deco/404 vinyl sim/all add some other magic to the sound that isn’t as simple as just throwing some fluctuation on pitch.
You’re right tho, lfo can sometimes get you thereabouts.
After their success/cultdom I’m surprised all synths don’t just come with a ‘boards of canada’ button and be done with it
It’s most certainly the other way around, as noted ‘Tremolo arm’ is a misleading source of some of the confusion, but vibrato is an unambiguous term
Anyway(topic) … aren’t there nice OT configurations ready to be implemented to get faux tape warmth and warble effects
There may need to be a slight latency to allow the re-sampled buffer to be wow’d a bit … but it’d be easy to get the impact desired IMHO, if not the authenticity (certainly for pseudo BoC)
Yeah OT can do some cool wonkiness but I only ever tried it on stuff already recorded. I think the latency would possibly be horrible to play if doing it ‘realtime’ from the record buffer? Also its a vibe killer to set up the lfos/lo-fi/filter etc for it compared to just hitting a switch. Guess you could have a ‘wonky tape track’ stored in an OT template session tho and copy/paste it to a track when needed. But still… Both Deco and 404 do a lot of other cool/useful things too and worth grabbing one of them if poss for this +?
I’m really excited by the AH for the reason it will give my already great VST’s the kind of analog boost I think they need.
I use an Octatrack as sampler/arranger and record out to my DAW. I’ve always been biased towards feeding my Octatrack with sounds from hardware devices, but now with the AH, I’m hoping the output from my VST’s will have the kind of character I found in some of the hardware I’ve used.
So my setup will be sound from vst’s and effects fed into the Octatrack through AH and then after arranging in the Octatrack I’ll send the stems out from OT through the AH into my DAW for final mixing. Should be a nice and small setup with great sound quality.
I’m not convinced yet about its value in this kind of setup/workflow? For live/non computer, yeah for sure. Looks great. But I haven’t heard anything yet that I can’t already get in vst. And with vst you have option for multiple instances and can tweak all tracks to taste etc simultaneously. Using AH on multiple tracks as a vst is going to mean freezing/tracks the track before you can use it on another one…
What distortion/saturation etc VSTs are you using that you aren’t happy with the results from?
There are some very good ITB options for this stuff these days thatll be more flexible than a single channel hardware unit, depending on if you can find a few that you like that do simialr sounds to the ones you like on AH. That’s the big question I guess. Just because I haven’t heard anything yet that’s wow’d me over vst, I still want to try AH personally and see if it’s a different story in the flesh…
Point taken and I mostly agree, but if I go the UAD route or other quality vst, the cost is still pretty high and I don’t enjoy the experience.
Actually, I’ve been thinking of starting a modular rack but I’m trying to limit my GAS and so rationalising that AH and Reaktor 6 will be more flexible and sound as good.
If you’re going to stay with the ITB hybrid setup for the foreseeable I’d def recommend demoing some of these before pulling trigger on AH. Though I’d also say that AH def looks worth demoing too, after you have some of these Vsts to compare it with/see which you prefer/whether AH is best place for you to lay out £670 etc…
The sonicstate video shows the AH to look a lot of fun. Id still get some plugins you’re happy with but AH looks very quick/fun/varied/instinctive for distortion etc duties…
