Bad Tape 2
Low Fidelity Freedom
Bad Tape 2 records over our popular Bad Tape plugin by offering an incomparable degree of control over its tape emulation parameters and even more ways for producers to delicately bend space and time or absolutely demolish their audio.
How Bad Could It Be?
More Highlights
Sequels Are Always Worse
With Bad Tape being one of our most beloved plugins, we felt it deserved a fully featured followup. Bad Tape 2 takes the original’s lauded reel-to-reel emulation, gives you complete mastery over the behavior of its imperfections, and piles on some additional effects you can use to further modulate, stretch, distort, and excite your productions.
With Bad Tape 2’s sidechain option, you can manipulate its effects and settings using an external audio source as a trigger. Make a kick drum detune your synth bass with every hit. Smudge your guitars into a sonic smear using a vocal to slow down their playback speed. Use a percussion track to turn Bad Tape 2’s Hiss and Harm effects into a polyrhythmic glitchfest. The degree to which your source audio impacts the plugin’s effects can be set individually, giving you endless ways to creatively trash your tracks.
Bad Tape 2 also incorporates the Push-Pull technology from our God Mode, Dragon Fire, and Bite Harder plugins, so you can saturate the frequency ranges of your choice without changing the fundamentals or amplitude of your sound. Want to give the crack of your snare drum a nostalgic glow up without muddying your mix by distorting sub frequencies along with it? Bad Tape 2’s dynamic Push-Pull graph lets you selectively apply devastating degradation right where you want it.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Bad Tape 2 also allows you to individually control the rewind and recover times of its detune effect. You can sync the parameter to your DAW’s BPM to create organic, in-time oddities or work totally off the grid to throw convention out the window. Break free from the limitations of other tape emulation plugins and shape your sound your way.
Audio Demos
Shape Your Sound With Bad Tape 2
Get Bad Tape 2 for $59 or download the free trial. The free trial will output 5 seconds of silence every 60 seconds until activated.
- PUSH-PULL GRAPH: Push some frequencies harder into the tape saturation using a 6 band equalizer to create more harmonics related to those frequencies.
- PULL (0% to 100%): Pulls back the frequencies after applying the tape saturation emulation. Pull is set per node in the frequency graph, but it also has a global control in the default panel of the plug-in.
- INPUT (-48dB to 48dB): Boost or attenuate the input, giving you more control over the gain staging and the saturation effect.
- OUTPUT (-48dB to 48dB): Boost or attenuate the output signal, to compensate for the volume changes introduced by the plugin.
- MIX (0% to 100%): Smoothly mixes in the different Bad Tape 2 effects, giving you control over the overall intensity of the plugin.
- COLOR (-100% to 100%): applies a warm or bright character to the tape saturation.
- SATURATION (0% to 100%): controls the intensity of the tape saturation, as if you were increasing the volume on a tape machine. Some automatic gain compensation is also applied.
- SPEED (0% to 100%): Controls the speed of the wow, shake and squeal features.
- SLIDERS HARM (0% to 100%): Applies subtle bit-crushing to the signal.
- WOW (0% to 100%): Smoothly detunes the signal in a pseudo-random manner.
- SHAKE (0% to 100%): Boldly detunes the signal in a pseudo-random manner.
- HISS (0% to 100%): Introduces some hissing noise, characteristic of a tape recorder.
- SQUEAL (0% to 100%): Introduces a high-pitched noise, characteristic of a worn-out and dirty tape reel.
- DOUBLER: Emulates an Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) system. An ADT uses two tape recorders out of sync to create a fuller rendering of a recording.
- DETUNE (MOMENTARY): Slows down the signal in real time, as if you were pressing your finger on the tape reel. The effect is applied as long as you keep the button pressed but you can use the shortcut “Shift + Click” to leave it engaged. Releasing the effect will cause the tape to be rewound.
- DETUNE TAB STOP TIME (ms / sync): Controls the slow down time.
- RECOVER TIME (ms / sync): Controls the speed up time.
- REWIND TIME (ms / sync): Controls the rewind time.
- FREEZE (ON / OFF): If freeze is enabled, releasing the detune button won’t rewind the tape, but instead it will sustain the same pitch-shifting amount that was reached during the detuning.
- TAPE STOP (ON / OFF): When the tape is fully stopped, it won’t recover until tape stop is disabled.
- VIBRATO (0-100%): Sets the range of the extra vibrato applied during the detuning effect.
- SPEED (0-100%): Sets the speed of the extra vibrato.
- DETUNE SIDE-CHAIN: Allows you to control the detune effect with an external sidechain.
- BIAS (-48 to +48): Adds a static gain to the sidechain signal, allowing you to control when the effect will be engaged or not.
- RELEASE (20ms to 5s): Sets the release time of the Envelope Follower.
- HPF & LPF: Applies filters to the sidechain signal
- STOP TIME (ms / sync): Controls the slow down time.
- RECOVER TIME (ms / sync): Controls the speed up time.
- REWIND TIME (ms / sync): Controls the rewind time.
- MAGNET (0% to 100%): Allows you to emulate a progressively demagnetised tape.
- RESONATOR (0 to 100%): slowly emulate a serie of six acoustic resonators
- 6x RES (0 to 100%): Sets the resonance on each frequency to 6x
- GAIN (0 to 100%): Sets the gain of the resonance on each frequency
- PHASER (0 to 100%): Sets the intensity of the phaser effect
- PHASER TAB FREQ (0 to 100%): Sets the center frequency of the phaser
- FEEDBACK (0 to 100%): Controls the feedback amount of phaser’s delay line, allowing for wild resonances.
- ATTRACTION (0 to 100%): Sets the character of the phaser. A low value will keep the resonances of the phaser wide apart in the spectrum, while a high value will keep them in a tight pack.
- LFO RATE (0.2 to 5Hz): Sets the speed of the LFO sweeping the frequencies
- LFO DEPTH (0 to 100%): Sets the intensity of the phaser’s frequency sweep.
- WIDTH (0 to 100%): Broadens the stereo field while maintaining 100% mono compatibility.
- SIDECHAIN: Allows you to control a lot of Bad Tape 2 parameters with an external sidechain.
- SIDECHAIN TAB GAIN (-24dB to 24dB): Applies a gain to the sidechain signal to have more control over the intensity of the effect modulation.
- ATTACK/RELEASE (ms): Sets the attack and release of the Envelope Follower.
- LP/HP (Hz): Filters the sidechain signal.
- BT2 PARAMETERS (-100% to 100%): Each controllable BT2 has his dedicated depth parameter that sets the intensity of the parameter modulation induced by the sidechain. Negative values lower the intensity of the targeted BT2 effect when the sidechain signal is loud, whereas positive values increase the intensity of the effect when the sidechain signal is loud.
- OVERSAMPLING (1x/2x/4x/8x): Processes the audio at higher sample rates to avoid aliasing.
Windows: Windows 10 or newer (64-bit)
Mac: macOS 10.11 or newer (64-bit) including native Apple Silicon
Plugin Formats: VST, VST3, AU, AAX (64-bit only)