It’s always nice to have a great endorsement, Waves “Kramer” Tape.
You are going to hear this if you put it on a track or bus. It’s not subtle and it fits in great with the other Waves Kramer plugins, the HLS channel and PIE compressor. Take a look at my Waves presets manual for one way to use them all together.
The tape delay feature is pretty cool, especially when you take out the hissy highs with the lowpass filter. If you use it as an aux channel for delay, go ahead and drive it into some distortion and adjust to taste. Or ear.
I have some things to say about tape emulations, and you can read them in my post, “The Joys of Analog Tape” on my UAD Ampex ATR-102 post. I’d be interested in knowing what others think about it.
Hints:
- Mix with tape plugins inserted and on, don’t add them after the fact in order to get some vibe. They all mess with the frequency response, and you want to be mixing with that audible all the way through the process. That head bump can start to add up, for instance.
- What really drives this plugin (and any actual tape machine) into distortion (oh, I mean “saturation”) is pushing the record level. (Look, I had two parenthetical phrases in that one sentence.) If you keep the input down, you will add harmonics without any distortion. I highly recommend this.
- Vary the “wow & flutter,” flux and noise controls ever so slightly between channels. See below!
Compare some other tape emulations:
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My PC_Mixing preset. This is as “flat” (a tiny improvement, I know) as you can make the Kramer tape, and I reduced the noise and wow and flutter. Keep the record level away from the red and you can use this on all your channels if you are brave enough. The harmonics will build up on multiple tracks. If you do use this on multiples channels, vary the “wow & flutter,” flux and noise controls ever so SLIGHTLY between the channels. Tiny differences is key. You can get my presets here.
