Have you ever tried to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without peanut butter? We haven’t done any extensive studies, but we suspect it can’t be done.
Similarly, we believe it might be nearly impossible to create radio imaging that does not use the infamous sound of the “tape stop effect”. Slowing audio down to a complete stop, or it’s opposite, speeding up to normal from a complete stop.
Rather than spending huge amounts of time having to transfer audio to an old analog deck to create this effect, there are many audio plug-in options out there, some are expensive, and some are cheap. Thus we present our list for the “economical challenged” producer.
PRO TOOLS:
Vari-Fi, one of the plug-ins included in the free Di-Fi bundle that is included with Digidesign’s Pro Tools software. It is very basic, fast and sounds great.
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=115&itemid=1009
WINDOWS:
PITCH BENDER, the super handy plug-in that comes with Adobe Audition, let’s you draw custom pitch curves on a time graph. This is should be standard in every DAW on every platform.
TAPESTOP, is a free and very simple, VST only effect that is recommended on many online forums.
http://www.kvraudio.com/get/826.html
GLITCH, on the other hand is a crazy sounding plug-in, with tape stopping as only one of it’s many audio mangling options.
http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/
MAC:
TURNTABLIST, is one of several cool plugin’s from the minds over at Smartelectronix . You have to load samples into the Turntablist plugin and trigger the sounds from a keyboard or other midi controller, so it can be a bit clunky to learn at first. The results after learning this plugin can be very inspiring when you combine live playback at various pitches while spinning knobs on the interface.
http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com/audiounits.html
EFFECTRIX, is not a free AU plugin, but since GLITCH is VST only on PC we have to mention this option. Tapestop is not it’s best feature though. Stuttering and mangling audio quickly is really what it does best.
http://www.sugar-bytes.de/content/products/Effectrix/index.php
SPEED FADES, is a new tool that is built into the FLEX TIME features in LOGIC 9. Suffice to say, a couple of Logic geeks we know are excited.
http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/whats-new/#flex-time
While I haven't tried a ton of 'tape stop' plug ins... my favorite still remains to be the Pitch Bender effect built into Audition. While I use Pro-Tools... I keep audition on my computer almost exclusively for this effect (and some basic single-file editing).
ReplyDeleteI've found the VARI-FI is ok for basic or quick things, but while it does pitch bend, it doesn't time stretch the audio being processed (as would a record or tape if it was slowing down), so it's not 100% authentic. Audition does this beautifully. (Except for that application switching thing... bit of a pain)
I'm looking forward to trying the other PC VST plugins mentioned here.
Thanks, Brownbag! You saved the day agaiN!