ValhallaDelay: LoFi In Action

Yesterday, I went for an evening walk. I was hoping to take some time-lapse footage, but it was foggy. Nothing was moving.

When I got back home, I was inspired to create a quick composition that captured the foggy bleakness of the day. So I fired up the Prophet–10, loaded up an instance of ValhallaDelay using the new LoFi mode, and got to work.

Here’s the dry sound from the Prophet-10, using a patch I dialed up. I made heavy use of the sustain pedal, so there are times when at least 7 or 8 notes are ringing out:

Some of the passages in the dry Prophet-10 track cut off abruptly, but this is because I was tracking with ValhallaDelay (in the LoFi mode) that was providing a “ping-pong” reverb. Here’s the ValhallaDelay patch I used (to try the patch yourself, select all the text including the < and > tags at the beginning and end, copy, click on the name of the preset in the ValhallaDelay GUI, and select the “Paste from clipboard” option):

<ValhallaDelay pluginVersion="1.8.2" presetName="NovemberFog" Mix="0.5" DelayStyle="0.6610000133514404" DelayLSync="0.5" DelayLNote="0.4760000109672546" DelayL_Ms="0.5" DelayRSync="0.5" DelayRNote="0.4740000069141388" DelayR_Ms="0.5" DelaySpread="0.4629999995231628" DelaySpacing="0.5" DelayRatio="0.6141414046287537" RepeatSwell="1.0" TapA="1.0" TapB="1.0" TapC="1.0" TapD="1.0" Feedback="0.375" Width="1.0" DriveIn="0.0" Age="0.4810000061988831" Diffusion="0.75" DiffSize="1.0" LowCut="0.0" HighCut="1.0" ModRate="0.2800000011920929" ModDepth="0.550000011920929" Wow="0.5" Flutter="0.5" FreqShift="0.5" FreqDetune="0.5799999833106995" PitchShift="0.5" PitchDetune="0.5" Mode="0.5" Era="0.6666666865348816" Ducking="0.0" Reserved2="0.0" Reserved3="0.0" Reserved4="0.0"/>

This sustained the ends of the notes from the Prophet-10, as well as creating a more stereo effect:

For the final mix, I mixed the beginning of the track with reversed audio from later on in the track, and played it back through an instance of LoFi with 0 msec delay and 0% feedback:

<ValhallaDelay pluginVersion="1.8.2" presetName="NovemberTapeWarble" Mix="1.0" DelayStyle="0.0" DelayLSync="0.25" DelayLNote="0.2000000029802322" DelayL_Ms="0.0" DelayRSync="0.25" DelayRNote="0.2000000029802322" DelayR_Ms="0.300000011920929" DelaySpread="0.5" DelaySpacing="0.5" DelayRatio="0.6141414046287537" RepeatSwell="1.0" TapA="1.0" TapB="1.0" TapC="1.0" TapD="1.0" Feedback="0.0" Width="1.0" DriveIn="0.125" Age="0.5849999785423279" Diffusion="0.0" DiffSize="1.0" LowCut="0.0" HighCut="1.0" ModRate="0.3759999871253967" ModDepth="0.4950000047683716" Wow="0.5" Flutter="0.5" FreqShift="0.5" FreqDetune="0.5799999833106995" PitchShift="0.5" PitchDetune="0.5" Mode="0.5" Era="1.0" Ducking="0.0" Reserved2="0.0" Reserved3="0.0" Reserved4="0.0"/>

This creates a saturated tape warble sound with additional layers of wow, flutter and jitter:

The original synth sound is nice – Sequential knocked it out of the park with the Prophet-10. LoFi was mainly used to glue everything together and add layers of noise and fog that weren’t in the original signal. The results sound like how yesterday felt.