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4. A trio of DAW-based turntable tricks

1 Pull off an easy-yet-convincing ‘rewind’ by bouncing a section of your entire mix to audio, placing the audio clip in any sampler, and playing it back in reverse. Then automate the sampler’s pitch transposition to quickly speed up and slow down the reversed sample. 2 Simulate a turntable stop using Kilohearts’ excellent Tape Stop plugin. We’ve found that a Stop Time of around 300ms with a gentle speed curve gives a similar effect to pressing the stop button on a turntable, while a longer time of two seconds sounds like turning off a directdrive deck’s power. 3 Make it sound like you’ve dropped the needle midway through your record by randomly dragging the audio region’s start point (with snap turned off), then placing a ‘needle drop’ sample directly beforehand. Loop some vinyl noise under the track afterwards, or it’ll sound like an obvious effect, not a realistic needle drop.