Been hearing lots of good things ("eats Slate for breakfast!!111" etc) about Boz Imperial Delay.

 

Echoboy is all you need.

 

SLAPPER
http://thecargocult.nz/slapper.shtml
i hope the teams are listening

 

@Pinkman that Sigmund looks like a total beast..

 

For creative delays, definitely.

 

There is something about EchoBoy that is...perfect. I wish I had it.

 

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone! I've got many candidates to test now. Exactly what I was hoping for, a diverse selection of candidates for the go to delay, as well as some nice special purpose/creative delays.

With reverbs, I was able to hear what exactly was going on as it affected tone, and depth/dimension in the mix. The more I worked with it, the more the adjustments made sense, when it was too much or too little, when to use a long tail vs small room, etc.

I'm having a little more difficulty with the delays deciding when to use what, and why use a delay here or there instead of a reverb. Obviously special effects like repeated words in a vocal, or a nice delay tail to a guitar passage are relatively simple to spot and implement. I'm talking about situations where the fix would be to use a delay. Maybe some examples of those situations and what the fix would be with a delay can provide me some guidance here.

What would be the deciding factors between:
Slap back (1 echo) vs several repeats
Delay time as relates to the material, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc.

I was working with a guitar track last night. I had two different tracks where I had used different mics to record the cabinet. I panned them hard left, and hard right respectively looking for some stereo separation. Didn't seem to be enough. So I put a delay on the rightmost track as an insert, and set it so essentially all it did was move the track forward a few milliseconds in time. What I noticed was that it separated the track better, but it also sounded as if the vertical direction of the guitar changed. Is that an example of what I should be trying to achieve using delays on a bus send as well?

I hope one of you guys can help provide me some guidance here.

This getting answered, I believe, will help in the selection of which delay I prefer. I am ready to test, test, test. Just need to know what I'm shooting for.

 

What I like to do is to have a few things dry that come forward in the mix, and then when I have a dreamy dense verb on say a slow instrument like a piano playing a counter melody against a vocal it tends to float up above the other bits in a mix. This really only seems to work for me, or works best when all the instruments are captured by a real microphone. With synths it can be done but for me it is much harder. Mic placement to create a sense of the space you wish to use as your canvas must go a long way go achieve this effect. And yes, offsetting delays of widely panned instruments creates the effect of widening the soundfield even more. It is an old trick and one that widening plug-ins employ. If Baxter chimes in he might give a short lecture on this phenomenon. He da man.

 

I'm gonna +1 Echoboy and Relayer. Between those two, I'll never need another delay plugin. They both offer some great options regarding the character of the delay as well, with sort of verb-y options so you don't need to put a reverb behind your delay if that's what you're trying to achieve.

HOWEVER

Given that you said VST3 preferred, I think I should warn you that neither of them support VST3.

 

Let's not forget LeMasque Delay by Xils Lab, which is a real gem too.
Cheers

 

Most of them I'm seeing are not VST3. Not really a requirement though. VST3 is organized better in my DAW than VST2. Soooo much scrolling to get to the plugin you need, haha.

 

As someone recommended above. EchoBoy is a great choice, simple to use and extremely effective.

 

I am sure I have tried a gazillion different delays looking for one that sounds fantastic, does simple stuff simply, and does everything else one could imagine or need to without it looking like the control panel of a spaceship.

Echoboy is the easy winner for me. It sounds like a delay *should* sound to my ears and only the necessary, well-named dials are present - with a drop-down "tweak" page which is easily missed BTW.

I love simple 1/8 delays and Echoboy lets me set them in an instant and just tweak a bit for it to sit in the mix like nothing else I've tried. Nothing else sounds as nice to my ears, which I find kinda strange because why should delays sound different, necessarily? It's just a repeat? ANyway, Echoboy sounds great, is superficially simple, but also does pretty much everything you could ask, I imagine.

 

I should be working on some delay stuff in the project this weekend, so I will try a few of these for sure. Echoboy is at the top of the list here so I will start there. It did crash Sonar last time I tried to instantiate it. I'm going to be updating Sonar this weekend as well so that issue may sort itself out.

 

D16 repeater is availabe now without the slate/iLok branding.

 

Trying the (no restrictions) 30 day demo....This thing sounds really nice

 

Its not vst3 im afraid but on plus side it is free though. I really like this plugin and use it quite often.
The bionic delay, moddeled after the tape delay in logic audio (old version when it was still available on pc, not sure if its still included in todays version)

And from the same guy and also free
bionic supa delay

both are very nice and worth a try imo