This is a feature I love so extremely much on the strymon volante: when you use it in half speed mode on tape mode and have mechanics maxed out, the drop in and outs are dautningly slow, it catches up with almost tape stop like speed and its soooo good sounding. This type of slow tape mod sound made me chase delayless tape mod machine and chasing this sound brought me to ribbons which is close.
This is something I would crave on ribbons to do as well, have a flexibility how fast or slow tape degredation could be set (i love it very very slow)
As well as for broken tape. Cause this would emulate old tapes running very slowly in the reel.
I allready have an Idea how to implement it, the same way how you change resonance, press bypass and bum, now dropout frequency encoder controlls dropout speed. Same for broken machine speed.
This would crank ribbons versatility through the roof even more. I can come somewhat close with wow but dropouts is more realistic.
Thanks and keep up the good stuff.
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Have you tried Broken Machine with Depth just above full-CCW and Speed/Chaos very low? At that setting—right before the extra delay you mentioned in this thread becomes audible - you’ll get a slow, pronounced pitch-warble.
Volante can do tape stop like warble because it sits on a long delay line; the extra latency lets its virtual “read head” wander and create bigger tape-stop bends. Ribbons can run large internal buffers too (that’s how the extreme broken machine settings work), but once you go past a few milliseconds the lag is obvious and it becomes more of a wild rewind effect.
In short, every “delay-less” vibrato – Boss VB-2, ZVEX Lo-Fi Junky, whatever – still uses a small delay and slides the read head around. Very low-latency pitch shifting with intense pitch shifts exists, but the artifacts are ugly; listen to YouTube at 0.25× speed for a good example.
Dial in T1/T2 slowly and you’ll find the sweet spot: strong warble, minimal delay.
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Wow, thank you so much for the detailled answer. It is fascinating getting an insight on how this all works, I absolutely love it, the committment is just insane.
Btw, most insane effect: ribbons w tape modulation into maxed out mechanics slow speed volante. Gorgeous.