Get Creative with Delay Effect

The Delay Effect has to be one of the most widely used effects in music production. It's one of the oldest effects, which can be employed on just about any audio material. An electronic genre that brought many different and creative ways of using the Delay and Echo effects is Dub music. Music producers from this genre pushed musical boundaries, and their legacy lives on in many present music genres, ranging from Pop to Techno.  

Dub Delay Introduction

In this tutorial, I will try to demonstrate the use of the so-called Dub delay, which will be accompanied by pitch modulation in order to create something genuinely creative and unique. For the demonstration, I will use the H-Delay plugin by Waves Audio, which is suitable for the effect and does not contain too many confusing parameters. So, without further delay, let's start being creative! At first, let's choose a drum loop and place H-Delay on the newly created channel within the SoundBridge: DAW. Here is how it sounds unprocessed:  

~Drum Loop Unprocessed  

Try Experimenting

Moving forward with the H-Delay interface, we can see that it is set, by default, to Sync mode. We won't need it in this case, so that we will change the way to MS (milliseconds). There is a useful free tool that calculates the actual milliseconds according to the BPM. You can find the tool mentioned above at the following link: BPM calculator.

For instance, ⅛ of a note on 100 BPM corresponds to 300 milliseconds. Therefore, I will first adjust the delay parameter within H-Delay on 300 milliseconds. In order to achieve the desired effect, I will automate three parameters. These are DRY/WET, FEEDBACK, and, most importantly, DELAY (time).  

   

Delay Effect Automation

After setting all three automation lines in the Drum loop channel within the SoundBridge: DAW, I will first automate the DRY/WET parameter. It will start slowly from zero, and as the drum loop ends, I will increase it to about 50 %. After that, I will automate the FEEDBACK parameter, rapidly expanding its value to about 130 just about when the drum loop ends. Finally, the automation of the DELAY (time) parameter will start right after the drum loop ends and will decrease from 300 milliseconds to 1 until the end. On top of all that, to introduce more space, let's add a bit of Reverb and automate its DRY/WET parameter. It will start in the same position as the DELAY (time) parameter from the H-Delay plugin.

 

Let's hear the fully processed sound now.  

~Drum Loop Processed