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Delay Tips:
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routingwithin
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Dec 11, 2014 10:45:22
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Just thought I’d share a tip with you guys regarding delay’s.
Sure using delays is an easy way to extend the decay/sustain of a sound, however it can also cause frequencies to overlap, messing with your db levels and balance. With many plugins you will have a cutoff knob which will filter out high frequencies on the delay – making it fade out gradually. Still it would be uncontrolled.
Music is organized sound, so having control of each element is key when producing digital music. You can quantize everything but your fx may still mess up the flow in the music.
Rather than using delay plugins, you can cut up your sample into repetitive blocks, then automate the low-pass on the EQ to gradually fade out.
You get many benefits from this.
One: with the low-pass automation you can bring the high-end back at the end of the bar or in the middle, fully controlling the presence of the sound. You also get the option to high-pass or band-pass (automating the Q)
Two: You can cut the repetitive blocks up into smaller parts through time ( 8th or 16th notes ) creating more interest.
Three: Shifting the blocks around at the end of each 4 or 8 beats. This will give the impression that the sound has a delay but hey, it changes within the delay. Showing control and keeping it synchronized. With this you can also create rhythmic patterns, locked to the bpm’s.
Four: Nothing overlaps, each block ends where the other one begins.
Five: The delay can be as long as you want it to be, and end it without extra background delays which are inaudible.
I use delay plugins as a preview and then break up the sound in synchronized blocks afterwards.
Cheers guys
  " We are together in this matter you and I, closer to death, yes, closer than i'd like. How do you feel? - There can be no division in our actions, or everything is lost. What affects you affects me. " |
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frisbeehead
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Dec 11, 2014 15:46
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delay plug-ins don't just repeat the sound, although the most basic ones just do that... A plug-in like, for example, audio damage's Dub Delay will, also, change the sound a lot! If you pull the feedback knob up, it generates the same kind of distortion (overload circuit type) you'd expect to ear with some hardware units... it's not just repetition, it's far more then that.
I usually render the effect down to audio, so as to get more control, the sort you're talking about in there. Just being able to make it shut when you want is a HUGE advantage here. So you can easily get the best of both: the sound and features of the plug-ins, and the control of audio editing, without sacrificing any of them... Take a look at modern delay plug-ins, the new one from d16 group, for one, has much more to it then simple repetition of a sample. |
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knocz
Moderator
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Posted : Feb 8, 2015 00:02
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These are great tips for simple usages of delays 
Effectively you end up with way more control over each repeat, when using it as a "echo" delay.
But when you start taking the delay a little more to the extreme, you can obtain really cool effects that are very difficult to obtain with mere sample mangling, for instance, bringing up the feedback (and the whole dub genre IMO is based on mangling the tones achieved with high feedback).. having a sound feedback and mangled with the delay components can make it evolve in a very organic way.
Again IMO you are very correct with the control - it's too easy to get things out of hands.. but then again this might be a good thing  In my case when I really want big values and delays start going out of control, usually I take the reeds and go on with an EQ and a compressor - just use a bit of M/S processing, take a bit out of the M part, and your delays become way spacey, while your original tone has room to sit in the mix.
Plus, I like to modulate as much as I can - so changing the delay types and mangling with the delay time.. and to get a for instance tape delay time effect with samples only can be very time consuming
I think sample based delays can be very useful when you do stuff do it that makes sense in having all the extra work (so you make it interesting), but delay units do take away a huge amount of work 
Quote:
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On 2014-12-11 10:45:22, routingwithin wrote:
Music is organized sound, so having control of each element is key when producing digital music. You can quantize everything but your fx may still mess up the flow in the music.
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Hmmm... I betcha there's tons or artists out there who's main goal is precisely to prove you wrong I know a few..
Nevertheless I do find electronic music to be very syncopated, so "errors" and "forgetting about the grid" while quantizing can be very good (for those who might doubt, just take a snare and anticipate it by just a tad bit - not enough to make you say it's out of time, but enough so it's attack can be heard without all the other info in the beat - like the quantized kick )
If there's something that can breath life out of a robotic and mechanical tune is a nice groove
I really don't think that if a delay is not exactly in place, the whole track will sound like it's falling apart, else, analogue delays without tempo sync wouldn't be useful 
Super Banana Sauce http://www.soundcloud.com/knocz |
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wirakocha
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Feb 8, 2015 00:31
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frisbeehead
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Feb 8, 2015 04:54
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Quote:
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On 2015-02-08 00:02, knocz wrote:
just take a snare and anticipate it by just a tad bit - not enough to make you say it's out of time, but enough so it's attack can be heard without all the other info in the beat - like the quantized kick )
If there's something that can breath life out of a robotic and mechanical tune is a nice groove
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this is a very good tip here... doing this also saves important headroom, since it's enough to preserve both transients (since they won't collide/hit at the same time). like you said, dub delays or emulators of such effects, can add tons of harmonics when driven hard (both with the input and feedback stages), and it's a very nice effect that can't easily be recreated by hand with sample editing alone.
automating the delay time is of course an old and still very effective (and beautiful) effect. even the good old psy bubbles, done with the resonance tone from a self resonating filter, modulating the cut off and the delay time knobs... but since we're talking about control here, a little math won't hurt, hey?
Hz is just another way of saying, how many times a thing happens within a second, how many cycles are there? This is the frequency, of course. It's easy to overlook how this simple knowledge can help us get more control of our effects. But you can actually have the delay time set to free and modulate between grid times, getting loose in between, so as to give a more organic touch and then spending some time in sync with the beat can work wonders.
nice we have web sites at hand that dispense the use of a calculator, like:
http://musiccalculator.com/
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ansolas
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Feb 15, 2015 13:11
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