What is modulated in the Floaty Modulation Delay?

Plugins
#1

I love Floaty. I use it all the time… usually left on the whole time.

I was wondering what is being modulated in Floaty…
Is it Modulating the delay time or pitch? Phaser vs Chorus…

Just wondering.

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#2

Modulation controls play head velocity.
(It’s Complicated :slight_smile:)

You know how tape delays work, right? There’s a loop of tape with a record head, and one or more playback heads, the tape moves through the mechanism, and the distance between controls the delay time, but there’s a bit of dodginess in the tape so there is natural modulation. Those things are pretty good.

Floaty is an impossible version of that, because I didn’t really know what I was doing when I did the first version.

In Floaty, the play head moves independently of the tape.
Tape moves forward through the record mechanism.
Playback head can move in any direction and at any speed. If it crosses over the record head it briefly fades out.

So it can do everything from major pitch shifts (playback head moves at 2x tape speed), reverse (playback head moves in opposite direction to tape), and ambient wobbles (small shift).

There’s also a filter and a couple of clipping and distortion stages in there to simulate other characteristics of tape delays (and also helps cover up some of the artifacts from the weird delay mechanism).

Thanks for the comments! There’s a differently tuned version that ships with the Reaper DAW, I still use it on everything. Cheers.

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#3

(it’s actually a little more complicated than that; the tape is static, and the record head and play head both move, but the record head always moves at 1x speed, the play head is variable, but the effect is the same).

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#4

Thanks for the info.
So the delay time and pitch is modulated like a tape machine.

Cool!

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#5

I probably should have told you why I am asking…

I’m trying to make a pedalboard that sounds like the Boss Dimension C pedal or Roland Dimension D rack mount.
I heard that there are four modulated pathways. Some with phase flipped and also feeding into eachother…
So I am working with four Floatys. Using the Input module plugin, I swap the phase of a signal and feed it to two of the Floatys. Two others get regular phase. Then the two out of phase are blended into the ones in phase.
I haven’t compared it yet… but it has made a very nice chorus/dimension sound which also works in mono. I will share it soon.

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