Description
Driftmaker is a delay disintegration device. It takes in your audio, recalls parts of it and adds analog deterioration as it plays them back. We designed it to capture the faded, time-worn sound of BlankFor.ms's debut on Puremagnetik, Works for Tape and Piano, and Tyler Gilmore (BlankFor.ms) made the presets.
On the album, sustained piano tones bend and flutter like light passing through a prism. Tyler records his world to a tape machine and warps it, sometimes speeding time up, sometimes slowing it down, and lets long-forgotten recordings on old cassettes shimmer through to the foreground. Driftmaker does something similar to whatever you send it: a grain looper replays the last few seconds of your input through tape warble, tone shaping and a chopped delay.
Your input fills a three-second buffer while DRIFT ages it. The grain looper plays from that buffer, then the sound goes through a tone filter, a high-pass filter and the delay before BLEND.
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Tape warble
- DRIFT
- Ages the sound. Turning it up adds random pitch wobble, moves the loop's start point, mixes in dust and hiss, closes down a driven low-pass filter and raises a high-pass filter.
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Grain looper
- PARSE
- Sets how much of the buffer the looper recalls, from a tiny fragment up to about three seconds. Short settings stutter on what you just played; long settings bring back older passages.
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Tape delay
- CHOP
- Sets the delay time, up to 4 seconds on the left and 1 second on the right. Lower settings also let the looper's playback speed wander more. After you move CHOP, the echo takes a few seconds to fade back in.
- TIME
- Sets how loud the echo is. Despite the name, it's the echo's level, not its time.
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Master
- BLEND
- Sets the mix between your dry sound and the effect.
- GAIN
- Sets the output level, from silent up to double. The middle is unity.
Try thisOn sustained piano or pads, keep BLEND low and raise DRIFT slowly. The original stays in front while recalled fragments flutter and fade behind it.
In Studies
Driftmaker is in Studies Effects, under Pitch & Time, with the BlankFor.ms presets.
The album
Works for Tape and Piano is on Bandcamp, and the cassette is on Puremagnetik Tapes.
- Formats
- Studies: Audio Units, VST2 and VST3 on Mac, VST3 on Windows · Apple silicon native
- Systems
- Current macOS and Windows 10/11 x64