Delay effects

Our attention turns to a family of effect types that takes your signal and does weird and wonderful things

Splitting an audio signal into two and then applying a process to one part, before recombining the signals at the output, is a technique that leads to all sorts of interesting effects. From delays to modulations and beyond, we’ve been using these sorts of effects for years. And the army of available plugins including flangers, phasers, choruses, ensembles and stereo wideners show just how important they are.

Here we’ll focus on three processes using three plugins from the Suite. First up, we’ll look at delay. This is one of the most common effects we use, and can create anything from quite obvious slap back echo and panning delay effects to more complex evolving textures. Often coupled with onboard pitch modulation and filtering of the delayed signal, and regularly equipped with the option to sync with your DAW tempo, it’s highly likely you’ll use delay in some form on pretty much every track you produce. It’s worth saying that the plugin we’re using for this walkthrough is also capable of many other effects including chorus. Chorus is an effect that splits the incoming sound, creating one or more duplicate signals or ‘voices’. The duplicates are then delayed and pitch modulated by an LFO. The length of the delay is usually between about 6 and 20ms. Any shorter and you’ll get a flanger effect, longer and the delay becomes too obvious. This delay time coupled with the speed and depth of the modulation and blend with the original signal contribute to the overall sound of the effect.