Impact Soundworks Tape Sculptor Plug-in

Create your own frankenstein tape recorder emulation to phatn up your trax

One of the intriguing aspects to this plug-in is how it presents tape emulation as a series of familiar parameters – that is, familiar to people who are unfamiliar with actual tape machines but familiar with basic audio processing. Given that most tape recorders have been out of use for a quarter of a century, that’s surely a lot of people.

Now, every third tech product is advertised as being next-generation, to the point that the words are pretty much meaningless. But being able to create your own tape machine emulation without sticking to a particular model is a very sensible approach.

After all, do you care if your digital synth tracks sound like they were recorded on a Studer or an Otari? Or is it custom-tweaked saturation/compression you’re after?

Please let us know if the answer is the former, and we’ll happily retract that rhetorical question. In the meantime, here’s Impact Soundworks’ release – complete with the backgrounder on DSP engineer Jatin Chowdhury:

FULTON, MD — Impact Soundworks has released Tape Sculptor, a next-generation tape plugin created in partnership with engineer Jatin Chowdhury. Tape Sculptor enhances Chowdhury’s free ChowTape Model with an improved user interface and expands it to include 10 independent tape emulation modules and 132 factory presets among many other improvements. The resulting plugin is versatile, easy-to-use, and effective for everything from subtle to extreme processing.

Tape Sculptor adds warmth, fatness, and smoothness to productions with the true sound of magnetic tape saturation and natural compression. The 10 modules can each be toggled and controlled independently: Filters, Emphasis, Compressor, Saturation, Degrade, Chew, Loss, Flutter, Wow, and Delay. Tape Sculptor can be used to keep a clean and modern sound, or push into intentionally vintage and lo-fi territory with 5 components specifically designed for retro vibes. The 132 presets give a time-saving starting point, conveniently organized into categories: Bus, Saturation, Mastering, Spatial & Modulation, and Extreme.

“As a longtime fan of Jatin’s work, I was thrilled for us to collaborate with him on this plugin,” said Impact Soundworks president Andrew Aversa. “It truly goes way beyond standard tape saturation, and I think people will love the incredible variety of sound design and shaping possibilities.”

Tape Sculptor allows users to infuse subtle warmth and color during mastering, fatten up drum and bass parts, add lo-fi grit or extreme distortion, or explore entirely new sound design possibilities.

Tape Sculptor is available at an introductory price of $79 (MSRP $99) at the Impact Soundworks store. It is available in VST3, AU, and AAX formats, with no dongle required.

About Jatin Chowdhury and ChowdhuryDSP

Jatin is a software engineer and musician whose innovative work in DSP has been widely-recognized by academia, industry peers, and users of his free ChowdhuryDSP plugins. His novel research includes cutting-edge analog modeling techniques, hardware emulation, and the use of neural networking for DSP.

Price: $79 (introductory; regular price is $99)

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