Several repeats at once, in a shape. The echo gives one repeat that recirculates; a multitap delay reads up to eight positions off one delay line in the same pass, so the repeats can be evenly spaced, bunch up like a bouncing ball, or fall on dotted and triplet divisions of the base time. Each tap has its own level, its own low-pass and its own side of the stereo field.
Taps and time
Taps sets how many repeats are read, one to eight. Time is the base spacing in milliseconds; even taps fall at one, two, three times it. For a tempo, the delay calculator turns a BPM into the milliseconds of a quarter, an eighth or a dotted eighth, and that number goes here.
Patterns
Even is the straight ruler. Bouncing ball shortens every gap by the bounce ratio, so at 70 percent the gaps run 1, 0.7, 0.49, 0.34 of the base time and the repeats pile into a flutter. Reverse bounce runs the same gaps backwards, starting tight and opening out. Dotted and triplet keep even spacing at one and a half and two thirds of the base time, the two divisions that sit on a beat without being the beat.
Decay, tone and spread
Decay per tap takes a fixed number of decibels off each repeat after the first, which is what makes the pattern read as a tail rather than a cluster at one level. Tone is a low-pass whose corner falls 20 percent per tap, so the last repeat is dull where the first was bright. Spread leans odd taps left and even taps right by the amount set; on a mono file it does nothing.
Feedback
Feedback takes the last active tap back into the line. The loop gain is that tap’s level times the feedback, never the sum of eight, so the pattern repeats as a pattern and decays as one. At 0 the eight taps are all there is.
In the audio workflow
The step chains like the echo: before a reverb when the repeats should sit in a space, after a filter when the source needs shaping first.