Real Analog Warmth is something of a meme in the music production community. There are lots of ‘Analog* Mojo’ effects out there. Some are Hi some are Lo-Fi. Prices are similar. You can pay a lot for not much. Or you could get this free VST plugin based on high end research from a particularly clever student at Cornell University. I think it sounds great.
Chow DSP was designed and modelled by Jatin Chowdhury. He’s a very busy man indeed. He has analysed precisely how these machines react to sound; the type of, speed and settings of the heads, the input and output stages. Next he has build an easy interface and bundled them together.
As a result, you can get lots of different types of sound out of it; crisp and dry, wobbly and murky. In addition it’s great for making tracks punchy. Moreover you can use it as a mastering plug in.
Real Analog Warmth from Hi to Lo-Fi
It does Hi-Fi very well, on the other hand it does lo-fi superbly. I use it in my own ‘Frippertronics’ Reaper set-up.
It’s great to use for mixing. I use it first on subgroups. Lastly on the mix bus. There’s a 16X oversampling mode just for mixing that I always use. Here’s a track with heavy usage of ChowTape to get things sounding tape like. Naturally all this power comes at a cost. Chow does use a lot of CPU and consequently it’s a VST to switch on later in the creative process.
It’s very intuitive and thus has nearly no learning curve. It’s free and therefore it’s a no-brainer that you should get hold of it.
Naturally there are presets, these cover uses like distorting an 808, extremely broken tape machines and classic sounds for all parts of the drum kit. Do I need to say real analog warmth again?
Because of this flexibility ChowTape has found it’s was into just about every piece of music I’ve made over the last few years. Here’s an albums worth of Neo-Krautrock you may possibly like.
Jatin Choudray, is as I mentioned a moment ago very busy. In addition to this he is committed to his work being open source. Consequently you can find an archive of his codes and materials on his website. Check out his website. There are plenty more effects that he has put out into the public domain.
*I’m British and so writing Analog in this way jars, it should of course be ‘Real Analogue Warmth’ but hey.