tape sway
Width and life to anything that sits too still.
Intro price until 31 October
macOS & Windows · VST3, AU, CLAP · v1.0.3 · 3 activations.
Sold by Swedish Sound Group AB.
Buying creates your account, where the licence and downloads live.
Listen
Dry to wet. A little is a lot.
The only thing between dry and wet is Tape Sway.
The movement
The part you get your hands on.
This is the actual plugin, running live. Grab a knob and it moves. Open a heading to read what it does.
The face, explained
Four ways of running wrong. Reel glides; 8-Track wobbles; Walkman drags and hisses; Dictaphone lurches through a narrow band. Pick one and the whole machine takes its character.
RateHow fast the tape breathes. Low is a long, slow drift; high is a nervous flutter.
AgeHow hard a life this reel has had. Warmth, a worn-head rolloff, hiss, the odd dropout. One reel per channel; LINK them or let them disagree.
The bar under the recorder. Leans the motion from a slow, seasick wow toward a fast, fluttering jitter. The character of the wobble.
How far the whole thing leans. A hair unsticks a stiff take. Wide open, it swims.
How far the two channels pull apart. At zero they move as one; open it and they wander into stereo.
Stop winds the tape down to a halt, pitch and all, then catches it on release. Time sets how long the fall takes. Automate it for stop-start hits.
The carousel browses saved machines. Step through with the arrows, lock the mix so it survives a change, and save your own.
Live signal · push anything
The side panel
The rest of the machine, folded away.
A panel slides out from the edge with three more stages. None of it is on the way until you want it.
Three more stages
Four kinds of damage, all scaled by each reel's Age. Warmth from drive, a worn-head rolloff, hiss ducked under the signal, and oxide dropouts.
There's a whole tape delay in here, swayed by the same wow and flutter. Make your own wobbly echo: repeats that come back warped, never late. Offset the two sides for width, Sync to tempo, or set Delay Only to wobble just the repeats.
A pitch shifter feeding the tape, up or down an octave with the tempo left alone. Drop a sound for weight, or lift it for shimmer. Three engines do the shifting, and they do not sound alike. Granular is the gritty one: half-broken transposition, for when you want it roughed up. Vocoder takes any material, and adds a rasp of its own. Resynth is the smooth one, and it keeps a voice sounding like a voice. Whatever you pick, the tape ages it on the way out. Off, it is truly bypassed.
A still view · knobs left where they sound good
You've heard it. Now put it on something of yours and give it life.
Intro price until 31 October
14-day money-back guarantee.
On Tape Sway
A programmed sound holds still. Nothing alive ever did.
Tape Sway is a modulation effect built out of tape. Two delay lines, one per channel, moving the way tape moved, and enough range stacked on top of them to leave the original behind.
Two reels, and they never quite agree. Keep them together and it is one machine wobbling. Pull them apart and the sides drift from each other: a double, a chorus, a width that comes from movement.
Push it and it stops being tape. The drive takes far more than you would expect. The four machines each fail in a different way, studio reel at one end and voice-memo dictaphone at the other. An echo sways along with everything else. A stop kills the motor mid-phrase.
Three pitch engines: one gritty, one that will move any material, one that rebuilds a voice from scratch. An octave either way, tempo untouched. Slide the formants along with it and a lead synth stops sounding like anything else.
It runs from a held breath to a failing motor. Subtle lives at one end: the piano that sounds too sure of itself, the guitar played too cleanly, the synth that needs a year or two on it, the vocal that should feel found rather than recorded. The rest of the range is where it stops being background.
Try it
14 days free, fully working.
Download it and a trial key lands in your inbox. After that the plugin keeps working, but nags you with white noise every 30 seconds. Buying stops it.
v1.0.3 · macOS 10.13+, Intel & Apple Silicon · Windows 10+, 64-bit · AU, VST3, CLAP. On macOS, open the disk image and run the installer; the manual walks through it.