Comeback Kid

We gave away the little brother in last month’s how does the full version of Baby Audio’s new delay shape up?

Last month’s Computer Music had a rather great freebie in the shape of Baby Audio’s Baby Comeback CM, a plugin especially put together for us by Baby Audio and an exceptional delay that is capable of providing sublime results. It is based on Comeback Kid, Baby Audio’s latest delay, so now it’s time to look at this bigger version to see what you get for not such a big outlay.

We kid you not

As we fell in love with our freebie, you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a lot more to love in Comeback Kid. Like Baby Comeback CM, Kid has three BPM-synced modes – Straight, Dotted and Triplet – to offer different timed delays, while the main Time dial allows you to select intervals down to 1/64th note.

Those pretty cool Flavor options are also included again, which add a lot of character to the sound. However, this time you get to dial in the actual amounts of Tape effect (for saturation), Swirl (for phasing) and Sauce (for a shimmery reverb), while a Cheap button gives you a kind of low bit-rate distortion, but quite a subtle one. These are great effects overall, if sometimes a little indistinct from one another.

Over on the opposite bottom left corner you get a set of Stereo options to bring width to the delays, either with a Pan control, Wider or Richer, which uses a pitch-shifting algorithm for a more dramatic widening effect. A Shaper on the top left offers two quite dramatic filtering options, while the Attack and Sustain dials introduce some transient designing so you can emphasise certain elements to be delayed – we had some terrific results on pretty simple sounds, homing in on specific frequencies and then emphasising the effect with the Sustain dial. You can also hear it in full effect on some of the presets (see below) like one called Pick Up The Telephone.

Needless to say things get pretty dramatic when you start dialling in different times and increase the feedback with the main dials and the output mix, but a useful Ducker control also cleans things up a little as it ducks the delay when the dry signal plays.

Conclusion

As we’ve already given our seal of approval to the cutdown version, it’s almost inevitable that Comeback Kid will get a thumbs up from us, and it really does, especially for the price. We particularly love messing around with the envelope and filter options and that Ducker dial adds a touch of class, all meaning that Comeback Kid really can deliver a varied, quality sound that is right up there with that from much pricier options. And of course if you don’t believe us, buy our last issue for a flavour of what this Kid can deliver. babyaud.io