Tape-Stop VST Plugins

Analog modeled start-ups and slow-downs. The famous production technique at your fingertips

Make it as accurate or lofi as you like!

Tapestop uses our virtual tape circuits to replicate the pitch behavior and instabilities an analog tape player produces when starting up or stopping.

With Flux, Noise and Muffle effects, as well as fully customizable start and stop times, you have full control – have it accurate or loose and bring your sound to life as you like.

To give you even more control over your starts and stops, the plugin can optionally run in full sync with your session and starts and stops can be triggered by use of automation at any time.

Key Features

• Classic tapestop and tapestart effect with a modern twist
• Can be as accurate or lofi as you like
• Dust control to add noise and artifacts
• Flux control to add fluctuating pitch warble
• Muffle control for tonal shaping of the slow-down and start-up
• Sync with your session’s bpm
• Retrigger either start or stop as much as you like
• Up to 9999ms of slow-down and start-up time!

Warm Up Your Sound.

Tape recordings have a musical quality that digital mixes often lack. TAIP brings this quality into your DAW. It will add some authentic analog heat to your tracks, without the need to route any audio outside the box.

Tape plugins are not a new concept. However, our emulation method is. Instead of using traditional DSP, we’ve developed TAIP around an AI algorithm designed to decipher the invisible nuances of analog circuits.

The result is a truly faithful tape emulation that’s intuitive and creative in use – with some added features to accomodate a modern workflow. Use TAIP to bring a touch of warmth and glue to your tracks, or ‘drive it like you hate it’ as an alternative to your distortion plugins.

Highlights.

• AI-powered algorithm, giving you the true warmth and behavior of analog tape
• Flexible feature set, allowing you to create a custom ‘tape flavor’ for any need
• Use TAIP to add musical saturation and glue to drums, instruments, vocals and beyond
• Read more about our AI emulation approach further below

MAIN FEATURES

TAIP is our attempt at creating the ideal ‘Tape Machine’ for the DAW-era, combining an authentic vintage sound with a modern feature set. Its parameters will let you customize the right tape flavor for any need.

• DRIVE: Traditionally, tape machines were designed to color the sound as little as possible. TAIP is not. You can use the DRIVE knob to add just as much color as you need – from a subtle touch of heat to heavy distortion.
• MIX/TAPE FLANGING: MIX lets you run your tape in parallel. You can combine MIX and WEAR to get a classic ‘tape flanging’ effect. This is caused by the wow and flutter of WEAR running in parallel with the dry track.
• MODEL: While SINGLE is a regular tape emulation, DUAL creates a series of two tape emulations chained together under the hood, each applying half of the DRIVE value. This will add slightly more weight to your signal.
• LO-SHAPE / HI-SHAPE: These sliders let you saturate the low/high end more or less than the rest of the frequency spectrum. (Example: Warm up a drum buss without distorting the low frequencies).
• GLUE: Tape machines are known to introduce a pleasing compression-like effect due to their low dynamic range. TAIP lets you add this effect – or even exaggerate it. Use GLUE for subtle cohesion or as an actual compressor.
• NOISE: Lets you add tape noise to taste – or avoid it altogether.
• WEAR: Combines wow, flutter and an altered frequency response curve to emulate a worn- out tape machine.
• PRESENCE: Part of the tape warmth comes from an attenuated high-end. PRESENCE allows you to decide how much of that attenuation you want. It can bring back the brightness that is sometimes lost on tape.
• INPUT: Choose between NORMAL or HOT (more distorted) input levels without affecting the output volume.
• AUTO GAIN: Allows you to add more DRIVE while keeping a consistent plugin output level.

Putting the ‘AI’ in TAIP.

‘AI’ is an overused – and often misused – term. But we believe it’s the future of music technology. It just needs to be used genuinely and with a legitimate purpose. For a hardware emulation project like TAIP, AI offers an alternative – and in our opinion more faithful – approach over the traditional DSP method. Where a normal DSP emulation would entail ‘guesstimating’ the effect of various analog components and their mutual dependencies, we can use AI / neural networks to accurately decipher the sonic qualities that make a tape machine sound and behave in the way it does. This happens by feeding an algorithm various training data of dry vs. processed audio and teaching it to identify the exact characteristics that make up the difference. Once these differences have been learned by the AI, we can apply them to new audio.

This process may sound overly digital for a plugin that brings an analog sound. But the reality is that ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ are two fundamentally different domains. To get a computer to behave (or sound!) in a certain way, it helps to think like it does. Re-creating an ‘analog-style’ signal path in DSP is thinking about the problem like a human. The AI approach helps us solve the problem like a machine would – for a more faithful emulation.

Presets.

TAIP comes loaded with 135 presets created by friends of BABY Audio – including:

• Mark Needham (Fleetwood Mac, The Killers, Bloc Party, Elton John)
• Max Jaeger (Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Drake, Calvin Harris)
• Eestbound (Travis Scott, Young Thug, Jazz Cartier)
• Rob Kleiner (Sia, Britney Spears, David Guetta, Cee Lo)
• Cesar Sogbe (Prince, David Byrne, Jennifer Lopez)

Display options

• Switch between three backgrounds (Black / Gray / White)
• Plugin window fully resizable

MULTIBAND STUTTER – HALF-TIME – REVERSE – SCRATCH – TAPE-STOP

Just like a DJ working vinyl, TimeShaper 3 lets you freely manipulate the flow of time, slowing down or accelerating your music. Simply draw the exact LFO shapes you need – our unique curve-editing tools make it fast and easy. Warp pitch and time to create everything from essential everyday FX to extreme multiband transformations.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH IT?

• Rearrange the beat
• Scratch like a DJ
• Drop in a tape-stop
• Scratch on time
• Add retro vinyl ‘wow’
• Get that half-time effect
• Reverse in real time
• Get crazy with combos
• Go multiband!
• Custom chorus/flange FX

Running inside Cableguys’ ShaperBox 2 effects plugin, use TimeShaper 3 on its own or with other Shapers — they all work in exactly the same way, stacking up to create elaborate, multilayered effects that’ll make your productions stand out.

MAIN FEATURES:

• New! Interface resizable from 75% to 200%
• New! Redesigned interface with larger editing areas
• New! Retina/HiDPI support for crisper, clearer graphics
• Built-in help — hover over any control for description
• Expandable LFO for detailed editing
• Set LFO loop length in beats and bars, or Hertz
• LFO loop length from 1/128 to 32 bars, with sample-accurate sync
• Audio-rate modulation up to 5.24kHz for extreme sound design
• New! Even better Smooth Step Mode, to avoid clicks in stepped patterns
• Trigger LFO in any rhythm via MIDI
• New! Trigger Smoothing to reduce clicks when MIDI Triggering
• New! Fine Mode with 2.5/10/20ms options, for subtle pitch ‘wow’ effects
• Dry/wet mix for each band
• New! Blend dry and Fine Mode for flanger and chorus effects
• Solo bands for easy setup
• New! 1-click Quick Presets for Stutter, Scratch and Half-time
• New! Dedicated selection tool for multinode editing
• New! 2x/3x button — double or triple patterns with a click
• Flip/resize/move/randomize wave or selection
• Copy/paste waves between any Shapers
• Unlimited undo/redo for LFO wave edits
• 72 Wave Presets covering all common uses
• 9 slots to store User Waves, saved with the patch
• Switch User Waves via MIDI
• New! Increased band-split range, now from 20Hz-20kHz
• New! Improved multiband crossover filters
• New! Smoother, more accurate spectrum view
• Large, precise oscilloscope view with Freeze option
• New! Magnitude oscilloscope graph
• New! Clearer oscilloscope waveforms and smoother LFO editing

This product is part of a greater collection of products. Check out ShaperBox 3 here.

REEL TO REEL

Reels is a tape emulation plugin with built-in echo section and tape-stop effect.

Based on an old Japanese portable tape recorder with a very distinct Lo-Fi analog sound, Reels emulates all the imperfections of consumer reel-to-reel recorders.

We have modeled three different 1/4” tape frequency responses and saturations, along with all the analog imperfections of tape recording / playback.

Reels will add a very rough retro analog sound to your mixes. If you are looking for a Hi-Fi mastering tape emulation, this is not the plugin for you!

SPECIFICATIONS

• Vintage Tape Emulation
• Tape Stop Effect
• Echo Section
• 3 Tape types
• Hiss and Motor noise with Envelope
• 50 Presets
• Resizable Window
• Preset system with randomizer

PORTABLE TAPE RECORDER

Reels is based on a vintage Japanese reel to reel, ironically marked as High Fidelity, found in a distressed state at a local flea market. Most of these consumer tape recorders, also due to their age, produce has a very rough Lo-Fi analog sound.

During recording or playback, the motor noise somehow bleeds in, along with the usual tape hiss, limiting the actual bandwidth available on the tape.

Reels recreates all the imperfection of consumer reel-to-reel vintage recorders, including:

• Harshness, harmonic distortion with loss of clarity (mid-range)
• WOW/Flutter, pitch instabilities due to recording and playback issues
• Ducking, random volume loss due to tape or rec/play head imperfections
• Crosstalk, the leak between left and right channel in a stereo signal
• Hiss, high-frequency noise caused by the magnetic particles in the tape
• Motor, mid-frequency noise caused by the reels motor

TAPE STOP

When pressing stop on a reel-to-reel player, the tape doesn’t stop immediately. Instead, it slows down creating a pitch down and fade out effect. You can replicate this effect with Reels, and you can also control the speed of the tape stop.

TAPE MODELING

We’ve modeled three different tape types, from ruined to NOS (new old stock) state. The tape types are named after the country of origin: JP (Japan), IT (Italy), FR (France).

JP Used tape but with an overall better frequency response

IT New old stock but with a limited frequency response

FR Overused and badly stored, very bad frequency response

Each tape will affect the sound in different ways, especially at higher feedback settings when using the Echo section.

WOW/Flutter, Ducking, and other parameters will also change according to the selected tape, creating different amount of pitch and volume changes.