SANDMAN PRO Review
Sandman Pro by Unfiltered Audio is a multimode delay that includes a comprehensive modulation section. With a “sleep buffer” and 6 different flavors of delay, there are a variety of options for repeating and echoing audio available here. The UI is fairly plain and simple, but in an oddly inspiring way, everything is easy to find and make sense of. Sandman Pro is built to handle experimentation and modulation, I can’t speak for every delay out there, but often times they’ll get fuzzy or fail to handle modulation in an interesting way, this is not the case with this one. Many Unfiltered Audio plugins of this era came equipped with a sample rate control, which unlike typical sample rate reduction, actually slows down the sample rate of the entire plugins, creating a pitch dropping effect as the current sample buffer gets slowed down, this even changes the delay range/time as the lower sample rate means longer delay time. It’s an interesting effect that treats their plugins almost like a piece of hardware with an actual clock rate.
Sandman has all your typical tempo synced delay times, including dotted and triplets, but as a huge fan of short delays I like to see how fast and what resolution every delay has. This one goes down to 5 ms, and has a resolution of 0.01 ms, allowing for very precise motion and tuning of the short delay. After the sleep buffer and delay mode you have your echo controls, which includes feedback of course, highpass and lowpass filters, and a diffuse control, which spreads the echos for a more smeared or reverberant sound. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the diffusion here, as it has an echoey synthetic quality, it might be perfect for some applications, but something about it isn’t quite what I’m after.
The Sleep Buffer alone could probably be its own plugin assuming some of the modulation was included. It can capture and loop the delayed buffer, allowing you to adjust the start and end points of the loop, and even reverse it. This looped region can be incredibly short for insane glitchy sounds, but most importantly you can modulate whether it’s active, reversed, emptied, and the start/end points of the buffer. This lets you create stutters, or exponential loops or simply jump all around various points of the delay. Because the buffer is part of the delay, this can capture all the fun motions and sounds you can get by modulating delay time or feedback levels.
Sandman Pro includes 6 delay types, or “no echo” if you just want the buffer and a little dirt. Each mode provides a different color formula for echoing or even addresses delay time change in a couple different ways. It’s worth playing around with and exploring each one as they can drastically change the character and capabilities of Sandman Pro.
Classic Tape: A tape delay algorithm that adds tape saturation to each repeat and has wow and slew for that warbly worn down tape feel. This mode pitches as the delay speed changes, the slew control changes how fast the delay “catches up” to the new position.
Modern Instant: A modern digital delay, the dirt control adds digital artifacts, and jitter shifts around the timing of each echo per left and right channels. With shorter delay times, combining jitter and diffuse creates a bit more natural of a reverb than diffuse alone. Adjusting the delay time in this mode instantly jumps to the next position, hence the name, this is really cool for creating digital granular type sounds
Pitch Shifter: Shifts the pitch of each repeat up or down by the specified amount, the window size control changes how fast the pitching algorithm updates. Modulating window size can create some interesting tones and textures. This mode also instantly updates delay time.
Glitch Shifter: Like the pitch shifter, glitch shifter also pitch shifts each repeat, though there is a lack of window size control. It is described as a “messed up” pitch shifter, and when you compare the two, this becomes obvious, as the shifting doesn’t seem to quite match the displayed interval. This is a really fun mode for insane glitch design, it’s not meant to be correct, it’s meant to be an error. When adjusting delay time the echos seem to pitch around like crazy, adding even more madness.
Multi-Tap: Dial down your feedback on this one, it can get out of hand fast, multi-tap allows for up to 16 delay taps that can be spread apart of pushed together in respect to the delay time. The amp control adjusts the relative volume of each tap so they either fall off or fade up. There’s lots of crazy modal and resonate tones you can pull out of this one, modulating tap count and spacing is ripe for sound design. Adjusting delay time seems to flange the sound, likely a result of both delay time and all the taps moving parallel.
Reverse: Simply reverses all echoes, you get the same dirt control from modern instant, but also slew from classic tape, meaning the pitch changes as the delay time speeds up/ slows down. It’s almost a hybrid digital/ tape/ reverse mode.
Where Sandman Pro, and the rest of the Unfiltered Audio plugins from this era, really gets insane is when you add in the modulation section. I’ll likely do a page specifically on Unfiltered Audio’s modulation, as it will apply to many of their other plugins as well. You can map the LFOs, envelop followers, randomizers, and sequencers to nearly any control in this delay, This means you can set up elaborate systems where the sleep buffer goes into crazy glitches, or the delay time modulates to create bizarre flanging, or create a macro that filters the feedback as it is increased to control the resonance. Sandman Pro seems to really let the user decide what it can or can’t do, I’ve played with a lot of plugins that seem to round off corners and soften sharp edges, but I like how much Sandman Pro really lets you mess with things and is unashamed of being a software effect
This is one I’d really like to see a sequel of, maybe with the delay time going all the way to zero, like in the Byome delays, perhaps a couple more algorithms, or a variety of diffuse options to choose from. Would also really love to see some modulation upgrades like remaps and MSEGs. I think it’s important not to think of this one as “just another delay” but think of it as a potential glitching machine, that lets you build your own buffer glitching effect, with a selection of delay algorithms, instead of a predesigned glitch approach. Of course you can always use Sandman Pro as a typical delay, especially one with various modes to pick from to cover a range of different delaying purposes.
You can find SANDMAN PRO at Unfiltered Audio’s website: https://www.unfilteredaudio.com/collections/plug-ins/products/sandman-pro