CLUSTER DELAY Review
Minimal Audio have created yet another innovative and fun effect plugin with Cluster Delay, an 8 tap delay with insert effects. As with all Minimal Audio plugins, the UI is incredibly cool and fun to look at, with a fun delay visualization and straight forward controls that are easy to understand yet provide complex creativity. The free delay mode can go all the way down to 1 ms but has one of the finest resolutions at 0.01 ms precision. Cluster delay offers several different sync options, allowing for not only the main delay time to be synced, to tempo, but also for spread delay time to be quantized as well as any spacing adjustments via “snap” mode. This is perfect for creating rhythmic patterns, as you can guarantee all repeats will be of a tempo division. I also appreciate that Cluster Delay doesn’t just have to be stereo and can do mid-side instead, for some wide stereo effects that don’t hard pan in either direction.
As for multi-tap controls, there are a variety of options here, you can spread the taps left and right, making one side faster than the other, then you can cross-feed each side making a pattern that alternates rather than just fast on one end while slow on the other. There’s also a scatter control for even more stereo separation. The spacing control is probably the most fun as it accelerates or decelerates the taps creating exponential patterns between each repeat. Ramp does the same but instead with the volume of each tap.finally there’s a couple filters to shape the tone of your repeats. I do wish there was at least one more dimension of control over the spacing, instead of just exponential rising/falling, it’d be nice if we could bend the tap pattern via some other timing metric.
The real fun comes in with the insert effect, which can be placed before or after the delay, or more importantly directly into the delay feedback. There are six effects to choose from: wobble, diffusion, chorus, phaser, flanger, and frequency shifter. Each one changes the delay display UI ever so slightly and provides some visual feedback to represent what is happening. Wobble literally moves all the taps back and forth creating a pitch warble as they move around. We all know what chorus, delay, and flanger do, but putting them into the delay feedback can produce some other worldly results. My favorites are the two that default to feedback routing, diffusion and frequency shifter. Diffusion blurs the timing of each repeat, but this one honestly sounds like they just added a reverb into the signal path, which isn’t technically different from what diffusion is, but normally there’d be a bit more transition between a reverberant sound and an echo. I say this, but please understand, it still sounds incredible, especially when doing feedback manipulation. The frequency shifter can go plus or minus 1 khz and just has that nice metallic frequency shifter sound, when it feeds back into the delay line though, you can a shifting and evolving alien tone.
I do really wish you could freeze the modulation effects and manually shift the center point, as this would create the wildest custom resonators, but I can make do with the slowest speed and a little luck + resampling. A pitch shifter would have been incredible as well. I think the biggest thing I miss is modulation, being able to use the custom curves from Rift inside of cluster delay would be absolute madness. But again, for now I’ll make do with bitwig modulation. I’ve been having a lot of fun using Cluster Delay to create insane glitched sound effects, using loads of feedback, or even putting it in a feedback chain and playing with the various controls, especially diffusion, result in some of the absolute best nonsense. You get wild glitching insanity when you throw the time control down to a super long setting, then when you pull it up short and fast it produces resonant metallic feedback, often times with incredibly natural bass tones, not just screeching highs. If you plan on using Cluster Delay for such purposes, it’s best to record and resample, chop all the good bits out as the output is not likely to be replicated exactly the same twice.
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CLUSTER DELAY: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/10-Delay/10273-Cluster-Delay?a_aid=61c378ab215d5