OTHER DESERT CITIES Review
Other Desert Cities from Audio Damage is a surprisingly versatile multi-mode delay, with 6 different delay modes, it is capable of handling most delay needs. Audio Damage has always been known for their minimalistic yet inspiring UI, always pleasant to look at and organized visually to help guide decision making. The two included LFOs can be routed nearly anywhere (with one notable exception I’ll touch on later), they range in shape from sine to square, with a skew option for more variation. There is also an included envelope follower, which can be linked to a side chain input for external modulation. The envelope follower can be nice for taming feedback or ducking the delay signal.
As usual I like to bring up short delay resolution, Other Desert Cities has a minimum delay size of 0, and 0.01 second resolution, meaning the variety of short delays is pretty limited as beyond 0.03 seconds, it stops sounding like a resonator. The only other downside is no easy way to link left and right delays, meaning you’ll have to make your adjustments twice. In the feedback chain is a diffusion algorithm, which spreads the repeated echos into something closer to a reverb. Playing with the diffusion and modulation you can get echoes that sorta run and roll, with more modulation they can ripple or bland together creating a chorus. With some experimentation you’ll be able to find this page takes ODC beyond a simple delay. There’s also a loop switch, which will infinitely loop whatever is in the delay buffer.
Other Desert Cities has opted to name each delay type after a desert theme, the actual technical style is displayed as well, but I do appreciate this mild inspirational choice. It doesn’t add much, but it sets a creative vibe that, at least for me, is a reminder that this is all chill and fun. Each delay boasts a variety of different controls, each with a unique UI and echo display, which only helps to make it feel more expansive and varied compared to if each delay type were simply an array of controls with the same layout.
Desert Shores: A simple modern stereo delay, you get very pleasant saturation and some basic filtering, as well as controls for spread and cross feedback
Mecca: A reverse delay that plays each echo backwards. There’s filtering again, a “smoothing” control to soften things up, and a reflect option, which seems to reverse each echo in respect to the last so the sound flips direction each iteration.
Cactus: A “dual-delta delay”, I had to reference the manual for this one, it loops the delayed audio in a buffer, and lets you change the playback speed of that buffer anywhere from 0 times to 2 times the actual speed. The respeed toggle will send the looped signal back into the feedback loop, creating rising or falling pitches as each echo processes the last. There’s a nice color control for shifting the tone of each repeat. The random control is very fun, it plays back each repeat from a random position in the buffer, creating all sorts of stutters and chaos. Jumping around the buffer creates a lot of clicks, so there’s also a smoothing control to soften this up. Since loop playback speed affects pitch of the repeated content, Audio Damage have included a toggle to lock speeds to semitones, fifths or octaves.
Thermal: A multi-tap delay with up to 16 taps, there’s of course cross feed and filtering. There’s a spread control that changes the spacing between each tap, this sounds incredible when modulated, like a super flanger. What’s really cool here is the ability to draw in each tap volume, so you can create patterns or different motion with the repeated echoes.
Mirage: Described as a “multi-head delay” mirage seems to imply that it is a tape delay based algorithm, it is actually based on an early tape based pitch shifter called the “Information rate changer” (yes I did need the manual for this as well). This one allows for speed control similar to cactus, but has controls for # of heads and window size for each head. I don’t quite know how to describe this one, it’s sort of a blend between cactus and thermal and is capable of some unusual sounds. I did find that manually adjusting the delay time from as short as it can go down to slower speeds creates some insane glitching sounds, this is not able to be internally modulated unfortunately.
Sky Valley: A granular delay, this one alone might be a selling point for many people, as granular is always a favorite sound design tool. Sky valley gives you control over grain size, position scatter, pitch random and pitch. The regrain control feeds the granulated signal back into the delay loop. Combining this mode with diffusion makes pleasing shimmer reverbs. Granular effects are just always fun to play with.
One of my favorite uses for Other Desert Cities is to actually “break” it a little bit. The “thermal” multi-tap algorithm does not allow you to modulate the number of taps control. I can understand why, as adjusting this parameter causes artifacts and subtle glitches, that for many will be undesired. But this is exactly what I’m after, I like to modulate the tap count via a bitwig modulation source, creating these imperfections on purpose. It has a surprisingly pleasing glitch sound as the different taps engage and disengage, it’s pretty subtle as well, but worth trying out if that’s your thing. When describing each delay mode, it felt like I was reviewing six different mini delay plugins rather than modes in a single plugin. The naming and UI obviously play a big role in this, but so does the variety of experimentation and novelty between each mode. I was somewhat expecting going in for each mode to be subtly different, like different tone and saturation, but really they are all quite different from one another. Other desert cities has a lot of character, it feels like a boutique guitar pedal covering various delay ideas that a more standard delay would be afraid to attempt. It’s also a glitch playground, but it seems Audio Damage have locked some of that out, but it’s fairly easy to bypass via external modulation.
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