AUD · Audio tools

Audio Tape Saturation

Continue editing Open in workflow
Often followed by + Limiter + Equalizer + Vinyl Simulator

Shareable link

Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Push a signal into tape. Peaks bend rather than break, the low end lifts where the head sits, the speed never quite holds, and the top end closes as you drive it harder.

Drive

Drive runs from 0 dB to 24 dB and is the amount of level pushed into the saturation curve.

The curve is normalised by the drive applied to it, so a quiet passage comes back out at the level it went in at. What changes is the peaks: at 12 dB of drive, material sitting near full scale is bent noticeably while material 30 dB down passes through as good as untouched. That is why tape behaves as a compressor you never set a threshold on.

The curve runs 8 times over before it is filtered back down. Applied at the source rate it would generate harmonics above Nyquist that fold back as tones unrelated to the music, and nothing downstream removes those.

Head bump

Head bump is a low shelf at 65 Hz, from 0 dB to 6 dB.

On a real machine the frequency depends on tape speed, and the bump is a side effect of the gap between the head and the tape rather than something anyone designed in. It is most of what people mean when they call tape warm. Two or three decibels sits under a mix without being obvious; six is an effect.

Wow and flutter

Wow modulates the playback speed at 0.7 Hz. Flutter does the same at 7.3 Hz, over a smaller range.

Both read as pitch instability, but at different scales. Wow is slow enough to follow, so a sustained note drifts audibly. Flutter is fast enough that the ear stops hearing it as pitch and starts hearing it as texture. Sustained material such as pads and piano shows both clearly; percussive material hides them.

Setting both to zero holds the speed exactly, which no machine does.

Hiss

Hiss adds continuous broadband noise, topping out around -38 dBFS.

It does not scale with the material, exactly as tape noise does not get quieter during a quiet passage. Leave it at zero unless the noise floor is the point, because it will survive every later step in a chain and will be there under the fades.

Example: a stiff programmed drum loop

Drive 10 dB, wow 15%, flutter 40%, head bump 2.5 dB, hiss 0%, mix 100%.

The peaks round off so the loop stops sounding quantised in level, the kick picks up weight at 65 Hz, and the flutter puts enough instability in the sustain that the repeats stop landing identically.

Frequently Asked Questions

A record wobbles at the speed it spins and picks up surface crackle from the groove. Tape saturates as you push level into it, bumps the low end where the head and the tape interact, drifts at two rates from the reel and the capstan, and hisses continuously. The controls here are the tape-specific ones.

No. The curve is divided by the drive it was multiplied by, so quiet passages come out at the level they went in at and only the peaks bend. Drive is saturation here rather than a gain control with a curve attached.

Because it does on a machine. Pushing more level into tape costs high-frequency response, so the two are tied together rather than split across separate controls. At 0 dB the corner sits near 19 kHz; at 24 dB it has fallen to about 7.5 kHz.

A rise in the low end around 65 Hz that comes from the geometry of the playback head and the tape passing over it. Real machines show it at a frequency set by their tape speed, and it is a large part of why tape is described as warm. The control here runs from 0 dB to 6 dB.

Both are speed instability, at different rates. Wow is slow, at 0.7 Hz here, and comes from the reel; you hear it as pitch drifting. Flutter is faster, at 7.3 Hz, comes from the capstan, and you hear it as a shimmer or roughness rather than as a pitch change.

Explore Our Tools

Browse all tools