Review: Arturia 3 Delays You'll Actually Use

Arturia are at it again. Continuing on their series of ‘Effects You Will Actually Use’, today Arturia has released 3 Delays You Will Actually Use. Let’s see if these delays are any good and if I would actually use them.

Delay Tape 201

If you are going to model an analog delay, I supposed it wouldn’t do harm to start with the Roland RE-201 Space Echo. This is a revered hardware tape echo unit that still sells in the second hand market for around $1300 USD. The tape echo also has a spring reverb box built in so it would give you the best of both worlds. Arturia’s Delay Tape 201 does justice to the original. It sounds like a tape echo unit. Crank up the input and get that tape saturated sound. The shimmer from the spring reverb is also very authentic. On top of being a true emulation, the Delay Tape is a stereo unit with a bunch of additional features like Flutter and tape noise controls.

Memory Brigade

The Arturia Memory Brigade is an emulation of the Electro Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe guitar stomp box pedal. You will find alternatives to the Delay Tape as there are some other manufacturers who have created plugin emulations of the Space Echo but you won’t find a true modeled version of the BBD based delay pedal from Electro Harmonix. Sure, there are specific modes in other plugins that emulate the BBD sound but this plugin is hands down the best model I have heard. The BBD has that unique filtered dark tonality which the Memory Brigade replicates perfectly. It too is a stereo plugin and has some add on features like an envelope follower that can be assigned to various parameters on the delay. Just the Memory Brigade itself is worth getting the entire bundle for.

Delay Eternity

The third and final delay in the collection doesn’t model any specific hardware but is a fully featured digital delay with 2 taps. Its probably one of the most extensive delay plugin I have come across and not unnecessarily extensive like the Logic Pro Delay Designer. Come to think of it, Arturia could have gone all out with this delay and added pitch modulation per repeat like the Delay Designer and a full on multi-tap mode but the Delay Eternity does try to keep things simple.

There are some interesting modes like Pan mode where the delay feedback starts off mono and gradually widens across the stereo image. The two taps can be in parallel or series mode.There’s a bit crusher and an extensive filter section. The extended panel has another EQ, an envelope follower with two destinations (unlike just the one destination on Memory Brigade), two LFOs with two destinations each! I discovered a lot of unique sounds with this delay but at the same time it worked great as a classic delay effect.

M/S Mode

It's worth mentioning that all the three delays work in Mid-Side mode where you can choose to add delay to the mid and side signal independently. This is something I haven’t yet seen in the delay plug-in world so I really appreciated it.

Conclusion

If you’ve never worked with third party delay plugins or crave for some of the analog delay pedals and hardware units of yesteryear, this collection from Arturia would be a great purchase. If you’re drowning in delay plugins from every other manufacturer, you probably have something similar so you may not need this. I personally never bothered with third-party delay plugins because after all, it's just delay! But after using this suite of delays from Arturia, I can say with certainty, I will actually use these delays.