Creative Tape Modulator · Manual

tape sway

Covers version 1.0.3. Read it once; the plugin is smaller than it sounds here.

← Back to Tape Sway

What it is

When music was recorded to tape, small faults in the transport made the playback speed drift: uneven motors, worn capstans, sticky reels. The drift shows up as pitch. The slow, seasick undulation is called wow. The fast, nervous warble is called flutter.

Tape Sway recreates that motion with two modulated delay lines, one per channel. A MACHINE switch on the masthead recolours the whole effect — from a pristine reel to a destroyed dictaphone — without moving a single knob. Behind the face sits a drawer with three more sections: WEAR for tape colour, ECHO for a tape delay whose repeats sway along, and PITCH for a constant-tempo pitch and formant shift with three engines.

It runs from a held breath to a failing motor. Most of the time you want the held breath.

Quick start

1. Open Tape Sway on a track.
2. Turn MIX up to hear more of it. Turn DEPTH up to make it move further.
3. Slide WOW ↔ FLUTTER left for slow drift, right for fast warble.
4. Click the vertical tapesway spine on the right edge. The drawer opens: WEAR, ECHO, PITCH.

That is the whole plugin in four moves. Everything below is detail.

The face

Top to bottom. The masthead carries the STOP transport and its TIME slider on the left, the TIGHT and HQ switches on the right, and the four-way MACHINE selector across the middle. Below it, the chart recorder: two scrolling paper strips, REEL A on the left channel and REEL B on the right, each with a pen tracing the live modulation and its own measured wow-and-flutter percentage. This is what the effect is doing, drawn as it happens.

Under the chart sits the WOW ↔ FLUTTER slider, then the two reel plates with the LINK module between them, then the bone panel: the preset browser and the three big knobs.

The controls

MACHINE

Four machines across the masthead — REEL, 8-TRACK, WALKMAN, DICTAPHONE — a fidelity ladder, each rung with its own flaw. Reel is pristine and dead-steady; 8-Track adds motor wobble and drift at full bandwidth; Walkman is portable lo-fi; Dictaphone is a narrow, destroyed telephone band. MACHINE never moves a knob. It changes what the knobs mean: the same RATE, AGE and WEAR behave differently on each, and the dirtier machines wander even with AGE at zero.

Default REEL.

WOW ↔ FLUTTER

The character of the motion. Left is wow: slow, smooth undulation, a loved deck with a slightly worn motor. Right is flutter: fast, jittery warble, a damaged capstan or a warped tape. In between is a blend; the slider's colour shifts from cool to warm as you move it.

Default 19%.

DEPTH

How far the pitch swings from centre. At zero the wet path is a clean delayed copy. Ten to thirty percent is drift you feel more than hear. Forty to sixty is clearly a machine. Above seventy it goes underwater.

Default 46%.

INDEPENDENCE

How differently the two sides move. At zero both channels get identical modulation: mono-safe and stable, good for keeping bass solid. At one hundred each channel wobbles on its own, like two machines running side by side.

Default 56%.

MIX

A standard dry/wet blend. One exception: when ECHO is in ONLY mode, MIX blends between your dry signal and the echo instead. See the drawer.

Default 38%.

RATE, per reel

The speed of that channel's wobble. The dial reads 1 to 100 and maps exponentially, so the musical range lives in the lower half: 1 to 50 covers 0.05 to 0.5 Hz, slow drift to gentle sway; 50 to 100 covers 0.5 to 10 Hz, up to vibrato speed. Set the two reels slightly apart and the stereo image breathes as they drift in and out of step.

Defaults: Reel A 7, Reel B 7.8.

AGE, per reel

Randomness and irregularity. At zero the wobble is clean and predictable, closer to a chorus. As it rises the motion wanders, surges and breathes; at the top it is a worn-out transport. AGE also scales how much WEAR that reel receives, so a young reel stays cleaner even with the WEAR knobs up.

Defaults: Reel A 25%, Reel B 32.4%.

LINK

Two switches between the reels. RATE makes Reel B follow Reel A's speed; AGE makes it follow Reel A's wear. Even linked, each channel keeps its own character. Matched, never identical.

Defaults: both off.

TIGHT

Tape Sway uses a small 15 ms centre delay so the pitch can move both up and down. The wet signal therefore trails the dry by 15 ms, and at low MIX you can hear that as a short flam. TIGHT delays the dry signal to line the two up, at the cost of 15 ms of latency. Turn it on when the wobble should feel like a colouring of the sound rather than an echo of it.

Default off.

HQ

Interpolation quality for the delay line. On: smooth 8-point sinc, cleaner at fast rates. Off: lighter 4-point cubic, less CPU, a slightly grittier edge. Leave it on unless you want either of those two things.

Default on.

STOP

A tape-stop transport on the masthead. Engage it and the whole output spins down — pitch diving, high end rolling off, as if the power were cut; release it and the tape catches and spins back up. TIME sets how long the spin-down takes, from a quick brake to a long sag. It acts on everything at once — dry, wet and echo — so automate the switch for stops and starts.

Default off. TIME 1.2 s.

The chart recorder

Paper feeds sideways under a fixed pen that rides the live wobble; grid, sprocket holes and the ±30 scale scroll with it. Each strip shows its own channel's measured W&F. The paper follows the STOP transport too, slowing and freezing as the tape stops. The display refreshes about sixty times a second, so slow wow draws faithfully while very fast flutter can look smoother than it sounds.

Presets

The bone panel carries a preset browser: a category, a name and a count, with arrows either side. Click the name for the full list, or step through one at a time with the arrows. The factory library holds eighty presets across eight categories — MACHINES, VOCAL, PITCH, ECHO, LO-FI, FX, SUBTLE and BROKEN. SAVE writes your own alongside them.

A preset is a full state: loading one resets everything and lands that sound, so presets audition cleanly against each other. Two things are held back so browsing stays comfortable. TIGHT stays where you left it unless a preset deliberately sets it. And the padlock beside SAVE locks MIX — with it lit, loading a preset keeps your balance instead of taking the preset's. The dot by the count lights when you have drifted from the loaded preset.

The MACHINES category holds the classic media — Reel, 8-Track, Walkman, Dictaphone, Boombox, Studio Reel. Those are sounds. The MACHINE switch on the masthead is a different thing: it sets the machine the knobs are speaking through, and browsing presets can move it.

Behind the panel

Click the vertical tapesway spine on the right edge and the drawer slides open. Three plates.

WEAR

Tape colour, applied to the wet signal. Four knobs, all zero by default, so out of the box you hear clean tape motion. Every WEAR amount is scaled by that reel's AGE: young reels stay cleaner, old reels wear faster.

• DRIVE is tape saturation. Harmonic warmth and gentle compression; it softens transients as you push it.
• DULL rolls off the high end, like tape that has lost its sparkle.
• HISS is tape noise. It ducks under louder signal and swells in the quiet, the way real tape does.
• DROPOUTS are momentary level dips, as if the oxide were flaking off.

WEAR sits on the wet path, so it colours the wobble itself. Any echo repeats inherit the colour too.

ECHO

A stereo tape delay whose read position is swayed by the same wow and flutter, so the repeats wobble like everything else. Its controls dim when it is off.

• ON enables the echo. Default off.
• TIME L / R set each channel's delay time, in milliseconds, or as a tempo division when SYNC is on. Different L and R times give ping-pong and stereo spread. Both default to 1/8 (650 ms).
• FEEDBACK is how many repeats. A built-in guard keeps runaway feedback in check. Default 18%.
• TONE darkens the repeats as they decay, like tape losing high end with every pass. Default 40%.
• MIX is how much echo is blended in, in normal insert mode. Default 10%.
• ONLY keeps your dry signal clean and adds just the echo; the main MIX knob then blends dry against echo, and the echo's own MIX greys out. Tape Sway as a pure delay. Default off.
• SYNC snaps the times to divisions of your host tempo. Default on.
• MODE chooses Stereo, Ping-Pong or Random placement. Default Ping-Pong.

PITCH

A constant-tempo pitch and formant shift, up to an octave either way. It sits at the input, so the whole tape effect runs on the pitched sound; the main MIX then blends your untouched dry against the pitched-and-tape wet. Because it is always in the signal path, the plugin reports a small fixed latency whether PITCH is on or off, and the ON switch is a seamless crossfade rather than a hard bypass.

PITCH is the shift in semitones, zero at twelve o'clock. MIX is how much of the pitched voice you hear. The ENGINE pill cycles three ways of doing the shift, and one knob slot changes with it.

• GRANULAR — a gritty two-tap shifter; the shared knob becomes GRAIN, the size and texture of the grains. Characterful, and it works on anything.
• VOCODER — a phase vocoder that handles any material, with a rasp of its own; the shared knob becomes FORMANT, shifting the vocal character up or down from a follow.
• RESYNTH — the vocal engine: a seam-free source-filter resynthesis, the smoothest of the three on voice, with FORMANT sliding the formants independently of pitch.

Defaults: off, pitch 0 st, engine Granular, mix 100%.

Recipes

• Subtle tape warmth. WOW around 20, DEPTH 25, AGE 15, MIX 30, TIGHT on. A little DRIVE. Movement without wobble.
• Classic wow and flutter. WOW 25, DEPTH 50, RATE 10, AGE 30, MIX 60. A well-used cassette deck.
• Broken machine. FLUTTER 70, DEPTH 80, RATE 40, AGE 80, MIX 100. Push DROPOUTS and DULL.
• Wide but stable. INDEPENDENCE 80 to 100 with a light DEPTH around 20 and TIGHT on. Natural width, no flam.
• Clean vibrato. FLUTTER 100, DEPTH 40, RATE 60, AGE 0, MIX 100, WEAR at zero. Fast pitch, no tape.
• Octave shimmer. PITCH on, engine RESYNTH, PITCH +12, MIX around 40, a little ECHO. A ghost an octave up, wobbling along with the tape.
• Detune thickener. PITCH on, engine GRANULAR, PITCH a hair off zero, MIX around 50. Widens and thickens with no obvious pitch change.
• Dub delay. ECHO on, ONLY on, more FEEDBACK, TONE down, SYNC on. The main MIX sets the wet amount.

Installing it

macOS

1. Open Tape Sway-1.0.3.dmg and double-click Install Tape Sway.pkg.
2. The installer offers AU, VST3 and CLAP, all selected. Uncheck any you do not need.
3. Install. The plugins land in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ under Components, VST3 and CLAP.
4. Restart your DAW and rescan if needed. It appears under Marlow → Tape Sway.

Windows

1. Unzip the download.
2. Copy Tape Sway.vst3 to C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\, and Tape Sway.clap to C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP\. Only the formats your DAW uses.
3. Launch your DAW and rescan. Look for Tape Sway by Marlow.

There is no separate app to run on Windows; the plugins load inside your DAW.

The demo, the license

Tape Sway runs a 14-day trial from the day you download it, with nothing switched off. After that, and with no key at all, it stays fully functional but adds a second and a half of white noise every thirty seconds as a reminder. A license removes it.

The key is entered in the plugin's account panel. One license covers 3 machines; manage keys and activations at your account.

Tape Sway is a marlow. product, made in Sweden by Swedish Sound Group AB. This manual covers version 1.0.3.