Analog delay

ATMOSYNTH built-in module

A delay whose repeats are an analog machine's rather than copies: each comes back through what such a machine puts round its loop, so it is darker, softer and rounder than the one before. Type is which machine. BBD is a bucket-brigade delay, as in an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man: a row of buckets handed along at a clock, so a longer delay is a slower clock and a darker line — a quarter of a second rolls off above three kilohertz, two seconds below one — and a loud repeat is rounded off as the buckets fill. Tape is a tape echo: the tape wavers in speed, a slow wow that wanders and a quick flutter, so the repeats waver in pitch by a few cents and no two are alike; the playback head lifts the bass round 110 Hz; the record head saturates a little lopsided, as tape does; and the repeats lose their top, more the slower the tape runs for a longer delay. Delay time is how long a repeat waits. A change of it arrives over a moment, as a clock or a motor slews, so the repeats already sounding bend down in pitch as it lengthens and up as it shortens. Feedback is how much of each repeat goes round again: short of one they die away, at one they fade only slowly, and past one the delay sings on its own, growing until the machine's own saturation holds it at a warm, round level — never a runaway. Tone darkens the loop, so every repeat once more than the last. Dry level is what came in and Wet level the repeats, summed rather than crossfaded. Delay time, Feedback and Wet are inputs as well as knobs, each with a depth for how far a signal there moves it, and the time input moves the time at once, so an LFO there bends the repeats at its own rate. Every knob the plain delay has is the same knob here, so a patch can trade one for the other. The tail outlives the note that made it, so it is added shared, one for the whole patch, as an effect at the end of the chain is. This module carries code, because a bucket brigade darkens with its clock, which is the number of buckets divided by the delay, and nothing else here can divide; and because the tape's wander is a random signal, which nothing else here makes.