Delay as a sound design tool

When we think of delay, we usually think of echoes – sonic repeats that make a sound deeper and more involved. Delay tools themselves have, over the years, become more comprehensive sonic processors, turning into near-limitless multieffects.

Some of the biggest talents of modern delays come from their feedback loops – the part that routes the output of the delay back into the input, giving you ever-repeating lines. Putting another effect into this loop can make a delay orders of magnitude more versatile and powerful.

With a pitchshifting effect added into a delay plugin’s feedback loop, you get an effect of repeating, shifting, cascading delays – an effect that’s very hard to make yourself in most DAWs. In our first tutorial, below, we take advantage of the shifting delay in ValhallaDSP’s FreqEcho, using it to turn a plain sine wave into a whole synth tone.

Another trait of some modern delays is the step sequencer – instead of setting the delay with knobs only, each repeat is represented by one step of the sequence, and therefore can be activated, deactivated, and changed in level, panning or other parameters as you see fit, on an entirely per-step basis. We’ll use sequencerequipped delays to transform drums and bass, giving them completely refreshed personalities.

We’ll also take a look at how to use delay as a blunt instrument, playing with time by creating risers and scratch-style effects. Don’t forget, rendering your delay’s output can also give you loads of scope for getting creative, as you chop and splice your way to glory.

Along the way, we’ve got walkthroughs and tutorial files to follow along – get yourself down to filesilo.co.uk/computermusic to grab the audio files you’ll need to get these sounds yourself. We’ll be using Ableton Live 9 as our DAW, but any will do for these effects.