Tape Warble Drone

How it's made

Source

a sustained chord (root, fifth, octave, low sub) played from a worn tape. Each note is a pair of slightly detuned band-limited saw/triangle oscillators (±4–9 cents) so the pad beats slowly.

Tape transport

wow is a slow pitch drift (0.4–1.2 Hz, up to ±35 cents, plus random wander) and flutter a fast one (6–9 Hz, up to ±8 cents). Both act on every note through one shared speed signal, so the whole chord warbles together as a single reel does; the left and right channels get slightly different wow phases.

Body

the tape head loses highs: a 2nd-order low-pass at 0.9–3.5 kHz with a gentle high-shelf cut, a low-mid bump near 220 Hz from the head bump, and soft tanh saturation that adds warm 2nd/3rd harmonics.

Hiss

band-limited noise (white through 1.2–9 kHz) at about −30 dB under the drone, amplitude-modulated slightly by drift, plus a rare quiet dropout where the tape level dips with the wow.

Envelope

continuous. Level breathes with a slow drift (±2 dB over 10+ s) and the filter cutoff wanders, so a long render never repeats exactly.

Variation

`rng` picks each oscillator's detune and the wander paths; presets move the wobble depth, the brightness, the chord colour and the hiss level (clean memory, worn cassette, drowned reel).

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.