Creative time effects

Thought that the domain of time-manipulation started and finished with delay? Time to think again!

Time-manipulation forms such an integral part of our production toolset that it’s easy to ignore how powerful, flexible and impressive it is. In this feature, we’re focusing on some of the more sonically interesting routes. Even so, it’s worth defining exactly what we mean by ‘timemanipulation’, the sort of processes that it includes and the sort of effects it delivers.

Expect delays

It may not seem impressive, but the humble delay has a lot to answer for, particularly in timeshaping terms. So whether you’re in a retro mindset, trying to recreate a tape-style slapback echo or tweaking the early reflections of your top-end chamber reverb plugin, in both cases you’re working with delays. In fact, let’s just list a few examples; solid-state BBD delay (capacitor-based adjustable delay line), digital delay (sampling-based modulated delay with feedback), flanger (delay plus dry signal), chorus (modulated delay plus dry signal) and digital reverb (multiple delays with feedback). Indeed, if you factor in some of the more esoteric hardware options, such as the oil-can echo, delay has played a vital part in music production for decades. What’s more, if we bring things right up-to-date and get into the effects possible using contemporary plugins such as (this issue’s free gift) Cableguys’ TimeShaper 3, we’re still essentially talking about delay, albeit with powerful graphic control over the delay time and changes to that delay over time.

Avoiding the gimmick

If you’re looking for another time-manipulation concept with a long-running heritage, then backwards audio is it. We’ll delve into the history of this many-faceted technique in our ‘Backwards is the new forwards’ pages. Even so, there’s no doubt this effect can be a bit of a gimmick, and like many effects, was overused when it first appeared. Nowadays we have many ways to reverse audio and take a more taskspecific approach to the whole thing, so if it’s just a section of audio you want to reverse, then in many DAWs you can simply flick a switch on the clip parameters. That said, this won’t work for instrument tracks, or more complex processes such as reverse reverb, and it’s these that we tackle in our walkthroughs. Indeed, of all the backwards audio effects, reverse reverb is not only one of the most beguiling but also one of the most useful, as it can be used in so many different ways. In our tutorial, we go back to basics and explain the easiest way to achieve this effect in our DAW.