What is this beast doing under the hood.

I can't seem to make beats not sound amazing after I switch that on.

My amateur ear says some kind of multiband saturation?.. at least?

Maybe Fabfilter Saturn could do stuff like that?

It also feels like it does a mastering "thing."

ANy thoughts? thank you

 

I imagine that it's emulating a lot of stuff that cassette tape naturally does to sound, which includes a sort of dynamic eq changing the response of the lows, probably frequency dependent phase shifts, blurring, natural highs rolloff, the peculiar saturation and compression if you drive it, and more. If you look to what happens to your jumpy peaks when you go to cassette, instead of being limited nicely and smoothed transparently as high grade modern limiters do, the tape instead acts as a sort of sticky molasses environment that slows the peaks down but doesn't fully stop them if they insist on punching through higher, and if they do then there is weird farty saturation that can be wicked cool.

Consumer cassettes sucked as a music reproduction medium since they're far, far from transparent, but are awesome if used deliberately as effects for the same reason. It's a case of the medium itself being so messed up that it ends up delivering a lot of unique character and making some music sound better than if it had been pristine.

 

the dev is super responsive on insta. hit them up! very friendly.

 

It's a dope plugin for audio mangling in old school style... Introduction video, amongst others, can be found here

 

Well it's not an instrument, it's an effect

 

Probably a bit of waveshaping and clipping going on too, since that's what tape compression is most similar to

 

I really like Sketch Cassette too. I don't think though that there is lots of overly sophisticated stuff going on.

The cassette selection probably chooses between different static impulse responses captured from different cassette types.

Age slider is a gentle low pass taking away some additional high frequency content.

Saturation A and B are two different waveshaper curves (soft and hard), nothing to write home about. I usually leave the saturation minimal and rather use a dedicated saturation plugin.

Wow & flutter, dropout, flanger and frewuency modulation: all pretty self-explanatory, but great to have as additional options.

The noise reduction compressor, which is some kind of frequency specific compresion, gets pretty extreme very quickly, similar to those noise reduction thingies found in tape decks. I tend to leave it off. If I ever use it, I typically turn down the bright dial and only use minimal amounts of compression.

What make this plugin great is the combination of all these crucial cassette characteristics under one neat and inspiring interface.

 

I tested ALL "cassette" / low fi tape emus.
The definitive TWO bests are RC20 and SketchCassette 2

Settings and sound

And they remove any need for "low fi" sample ... probably made with those plugins

 

Last edited: Feb 27, 2024