Delay yourself for free with iZotope DDLY Dynamic Delay
You can never have enough delay in my opinion, my music is always threaded with echoes and pings and pongs and so it’s to my great delight that iZotope have released a delay plug-in that not only looks intriguing but is completely free until the 10th March. This comes only days after they reintroduced their Vinyl plug-in for free as well – maybe there’s something in the air.
The look of the interface is odd but striking, it looks like it’s designed to be an Anaglyph 3D image so I grabbed my red and blue 3D glasses (which I always have to hand) but they didn’t appear to do anything helpful – missed opportunity there, I think. On the other hand the popup windows that appear when you hover the mouse over any knob are very helpful indeed. The types of controls are very familiar but how it works is less so and it can take a bit of experimentation to start to appreciate what’s going on. The nuts of it is that the DDLY Dynamic Delay responds to the character of the source and the display in the centre lets you set a threshold to split the signal based on transients. Those above the line go to the top delay line and those below go to the bottom one. Alongside is an intensity knob which governs the strength of the split so you can effect harder transients differently to the softer ones. The two delays are the same and have two modes – analogue and granular. The analogue works exactly as you’d expect, with a good lo-fi feel and it has a nice distortion element called “Trash” which really beefs up the sound. The granular has a pitch element which throws in some interesting randomness – or at least that what happens when I’m using it. On both channels there’s a filter which allows you to shape the frequency range of the effected signal. In between the filters is a nice “Panic” button which clears up the delay line if it’s all descended into madness. The display in the middle gives an active indication of what’s going on, although I’m not entirely sure what the wiggly line is depicting – but it’s very nice to look at.
iZotope want you to have fun with this and have evidently enjoyed putting it all together – the manual is a riot. There’s no presets or saving ability, iZotope encourage you to play and experiment. They even have a downloadable old school recall sheet so you can write down your favourite settings:
http://downloads.izotope.com/guides/izotope-ddly-dynamic-delay-recall-sheet.pdf
DDLY Dynamic Delay is available for download now and is free until the 10th March. It comes in VST2, VST3, AU, AAX, RTAS and Audiosuite formats, for OSX and Windows, and supports sample rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz.
If you really want to mess it about drop iZotope Vinyl in before the DDLY and get granular on the warping 🙂
More information: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/effects-instruments/ddly-dynamic-delay/
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