Welcome to Music Nation. There are a lot of delay plug-ins around. A lot. So when PSP Audioware releases another one, the obvious question is: what does this one actually bring to the party? With BBDelay, I’m really hoping the answer isn’t simply “another convincing vintage delay.”
Inspired by the Dynacord VRS 23, BBDelay takes the sound and operating concept of an old-school BBD – Bucket Brigade Device – delay/reverb unit and expands it into something considerably more flexible. PSP has modelled the individual BBD chips, the compander and its misalignment, while adding modern features including modulation, transient shaping, gating, ducking, saturation and a dedicated reverb mode.
The result is a plug-in that can certainly produce those familiar dark, slightly unstable analogue repeats, but which becomes much more interesting once you stop treating it as a conventional delay.
Lets check it out
A Beautiful Piece of Software
Let’s start with something that isn’t particularly technical: BBDelay looks gorgeous. PSP Audioware has always the masters at creating interfaces that feel like instruments rather than software control panels, and BBDelay is no exception. The full-scaleable GUI is particularly welcome, and the combination of hardware-inspired controls and modern graphics gives it a convincing sense of physicality without becoming difficult to read.
There’s also some excellent attention to detail.
You can make the entire plugin more closer in appearance to the original hardware by clicking the small arrow button underneath the insert switch, making the UI more compact but not bypassing the effects.
There is a cool contextual help feature that allows you to move your mouse over a control and a small help window explains what it does, when you’re more familiar with the plugin you can disable this feature in the preference panel. Even better, the PDF manual is accessible directly from the plug-in. That might sound like a minor convenience, but with something this deep, having the manual immediately available is genuinely useful.
And you may need it. Not because BBDelay is badly designed, but because there is considerably more going on here than the interface initially suggests.
Getting Into the Delay
The heart of BBDelay is the central Delay/Regen section, and this was the part I initially spent the most time getting my head around.
You can run the delay in standard mode up to 400ms, or double that to 800ms using X2 mode. There are also four discrete delay settings, conventional time control, musical note selection and a continuously variable Speed control covering 0.25x to 4x. The Time-Base controls quickly became one of my favourite parts of the plug-in.
They’re particularly useful when you’re working musically because you can move between conventional note-based delays and much more fluid, speed-based effects without having to completely rethink the patch. I found myself reaching for these controls constantly during testing.
Then there are the four Effect Modes: Mono Delay, Dual Mono Delay, Ping-Pong and Reverb.
The width possibilities are excellent, particularly in Dual Mono and Ping-Pong modes. Rather than simply having a stereo delay where you adjust left and right times, BBDelay gives you a more deliberate way of controlling how the effect occupies the stereo field.
And the Reverb mode is a welcome addition. It doesn’t attempt to replace a dedicated reverb, but instead gives the BBD architecture another way to behave. The resulting ambience can be surprisingly unusual. That’s really where BBDelay starts to distinguish itself for me.
The Insert Section
For me, the Insert section is where BBDelay gets particularly interesting. You have filtering, ducking, transient processing, gating and saturation available within the effect, and these aren’t simply token additions designed to pad out the feature list.
The Filter and Ducker do exactly what you’d expect, and they’re extremely useful. Being able to shape the frequency content within the delay path means you can make the repeats progressively darker or thinner as they regenerate, rather than simply EQing the final output.
But I found the Transient and Gate controls considerably more interesting. Experimenting with these produced radically different results, and importantly, they remained musical. The transient control can make the repeats behave very differently from the original sound, while the Gate can turn what would otherwise be a continuous delay trail into something much more rhythmic and fragmented.
This is the point where BBDelay starts moving away from being a traditional mixing effect and towards becoming a sound-design tool.
And then there’s the Saturator. There’s a considerable amount of character available from that single feature. Push it and the repeats acquire a distinctly more aggressive personality, but even small amounts can give the effect a sense of weight and presence. Controls for the depth and blend (soft, normal or hard shapes) allow further control over its character.
Sometimes you don’t need another twenty controls. You just need the right one.
Modulation and Movement
The modulation section is relatively simple, offering Sine, Triangle, Square and Random modes. You can introduce movement into the delay without needing to decipher a modulation matrix, and the effect ranges from subtle pitch instability to considerably stranger results.
The Random mode is particularly good fun when you stop trying to make the delay behave itself.
That seems to be the underlying philosophy of BBDelay: give you enough control to make the effect predictable when you need it to be, then provide enough flexibility to make it misbehave when you don’t.
Seven Versions of Your Sound
One of my favourite features isn’t really about sound at all. The Assign function lets you save snapshots into seven slots, allowing you to switch between different versions of the effect, this is brilliant.
You might have a fairly restrained vocal delay in one slot, a wide version in another, a heavily modulated version in a third and something completely ridiculous in another. Once you’ve created them, you can move between them without having to remember which controls you changed.
I can see this being particularly useful in live situations, but it’s equally useful during production. It also encourages experimentation because you’re less afraid of losing a sound you’ve already created.
The Analogue Character
Of course, the big selling point here is the BBD modelling. PSP has gone considerably deeper than simply adding some filtering and saturation to a digital delay. BBDelay models individual BBD chips, along with the compander and its alignment characteristics.
There are also three “Dirty” processing settings intended to introduce more of the imperfections associated with the analogue circuitry. I couldn’t always hear much difference. The Dirt control is doing some fairly sophisticated things under the hood, affecting the analogue stages, BBD chips and compander behaviour, but moving between clean and rough settings didn’t produce the dramatic contrast I was expecting.
That may simply be because these characteristics are deliberately subtle. In a mix, particularly once you’re listening to the original signal alongside the repeats, small differences in noise, distortion and frequency response can disappear surprisingly quickly.
What I Would Like to See
There is one other thing I kept thinking about while using BBDelay – this is begging for some form of performance controller. Something like Reason Studio’s The Echo’s Triggered and Roll controls would be amazing. There are so many parameters here that would be fantastic to manipulate in real time. Delay speed, regeneration, modulation, saturation, gating and the various processing controls all lend themselves to performance.
BBDelay has the foundations for this kind of workflow, particularly with the Assign snapshots, but I think some kind of dedicated performance or macro system would take it somewhere else entirely.
Conclusion
BBDelay is an interesting product here, PSP Audioware has taken the distinctive limitations and behaviour of technology and turned them into a creative playground. It can certainly do the obvious jobs. Give it a vocal and you can get a warm, controlled echo. Put it on a guitar and it can provide movement and space. Put it on a synth and things get considerably more interesting.
But once you start combining the Time-Base controls with modulation, transient shaping, gating, filtering and saturation, you’re no longer simply creating repeats of the original sound, you’re creating something that evolves from it.
The interface is beautiful, the controls are surprisingly manageable considering how much is happening under the surface, and the enormous preset collection provides plenty of inspiration. The Insert section is particularly good, with the Transient and Gate controls offering far more creative possibilities than I initially expected.
The analogue character controls are perhaps a little more subtle than I would have liked, and I’d love to see PSP add some kind of dedicated performance-control system in the future.
But those are relatively minor complaints. BBDelay is a very great delay, but more importantly, it’s a very great sound-design tool.
If all you need is another quarter-note echo, there are cheaper and simpler options. If you want a delay that encourages you to experiment with what happens after the original sound has disappeared, PSP BBDelay is considerably more interesting.
Highly Recommended.
Head over to PSP Audioware for full details on BBDelay
