Found solution for MPC standalone tape effect

Hey everyone,

I’ve been looking for a good tape effect which gives me wow and flutter and some of the compression and tone that tape gives me in the MPC stand alone.

Turns out the tape delay has a very good way to achieve this. If you pull up the basic presets called wow and flutter and adjust it to remove any delays from head number 2, 3 and 4 as well as turn feedback all the way to zero and dry/wet to 100% this gives you a great tape sound.

The only problem is that it is not real-time. you need to record the output of the effect and then chop off the beginning of the resultant audio. I often set the time to 1/8 note then change my sequence to have one extra bar and use either the sampler or looper to re-sample the audio. With sampler you can set a threshold so it does not begin recording until the very first hit which is probably on the down beat. When you place this audio on an audio track or in a clip or a drum program the downbeat should align and everything else should align perfectly.

Hope this tip helps some of you lo-fi.

Sounds great- looking forward to checking this out. Thanks for the idea!

Sweet!! Awesome tip!

This is dope T-monk! I guess those older plugins do have some uses!

The Air Lo-fi is disappointing.

What I've been doing is running the out 5/6 into a Behringer Echo Machine pedal, then back into the inputs. The pedal has a nice tape delay as well, but in "almost" realtime.

Wow. This is great. Awesome find!!

I really really wish AKai would allow the mellotron plug to have an audio in already though. That plug-in has some of the best lofi fx I've heard from any hardware or software emulator. I would literally put that &^(&* on everything.

I agree SuperKonquer

If they could port the Mellotron effect into a standalone version with the tone shaping, vinyl noise and wow and flutter it would be great.

The reason I was looking for a tape effect was to degrade my loops a little and get some specific clipping. It’s no waves plugin, but having a standalone workaround is great. With a little ingenuity, you can pretty much do anything with the MPC.

T-Monk wrote:Hey everyone,

I’ve been looking for a good tape effect which gives me wow and flutter and some of the compression and tone that tape gives me in the MPC stand alone.

Turns out the tape delay has a very good way to achieve this. If you pull up the basic presets called wow and flutter and adjust it to remove any delays from head number 2, 3 and 4 as well as turn feedback all the way to zero and dry/wet to 100% this gives you a great tape sound.

The only problem is that it is not real-time. you need to record the output of the effect and then chop off the beginning of the resultant audio. I often set the time to 1/8 note then change my sequence to have one extra bar and use either the sampler or looper to re-sample the audio. With sampler you can set a threshold so it does not begin recording until the very first hit which is probably on the down beat. When you place this audio on an audio track or in a clip or a drum program the downbeat should align and everything else should align perfectly.

Hope this tip helps some of you lo-fi.

Nice technique! I just replicated your suggested settings and saved the preset - if anyone wants it, you can download it from the link below (for about 1 week - note the link expires). Do wish that latency delay wasn't at the beginning though - but oh well!

Preset link (expires 2/25/22):

https://we.tl/t-fN17xwpvta