tape fiasco 2
The plugin that turns a single audio loop into a performance instrument.
Most audio plugins process your sound. Tape Fiasco performs it. At its core are four independent time engines: a dual-grain stretcher that slows, freezes and scrubs your audio in real time; a tape-machine emulation with mechanical wow, flutter, tape stop and scratch; a rhythmic slicer that captures and repeats at any subdivision you choose; and BendIt, a circuit-bent buffer mangler with a seven-zone pitch and direction macro that goes from subtle wobble to full DJ scratch, quantized to your host grid. All four run simultaneously, chained in any order you want.
Behind the time engines sits another 21 effects, from spectral filtering and modal resonators to distortion, bit destruction, circuit bending and beyond, followed by a master stage with a three-band EQ, compressor, soft limiter and auto gain.
Routing goes deep. Animate any parameter with multiple modulators (LFOs, random, envelope followers) and bezier graph editors. Stretch, bend, and stutter your sound with sequencers. The Perform section puts four macros and an X/Y pad on the front panel, all recordable as host automation, each routing to up to five destinations with triangular response curves that let one knob crossfade between three different points across its travel. Everything that moves on screen is a parameter you can automate, sequence, or modulate.
What is Tape Fiasco 2
What it does, at a glance
Section
What it covers
TIME
It is not a pitch-shifter (no formant preservation, no granular). Speed and pitch are coupled the way they are on tape: slow the playback, the pitch drops. The character comes from the mechanical modulation, the rebased-read crossfade per tempo window, the saturation/compressor pair, and the per-sample handling of direction and rate.
FX
A drag-to-reorder chain of up to 21 effects. A permanent MASTER row at the bottom handles output gain, 3-band EQ, pan, compressor, and a soft limiter.
ANIMATE
Four modulator columns (LFO / RANDOM / E.FOLLOWER), three bezier graph editors, plus the STUTTER sequencer and STRETCH sequencer. Up to 42 (72 with Perform) simultaneous modulation destinations.
PERFORM
Four macro knobs and a 2-axis X/Y pad, each routable to up to 5 destinations with per-slot response curves. Designed for host-automatable live tweaks.
Audio flows through the engines in this order: Input → Time engines → FX chain → MASTER. The time-engine order (Stretch → Vari → Stutter, or any of three other routings, including Parallel) is selectable on the TIME page. The FX chain order is set by dragging on the FX page.
The four engines
STRETCH
It is not a pitch-shifter (no formant preservation, no granular). Speed and pitch are coupled the way they are on tape: slow the playback, the pitch drops. The character comes from the mechanical modulation, the rebased-read crossfade per tempo window, the saturation/compressor pair, and the per-sample handling of direction and rate. Stretch speed can be sequenced by the 64 step Stretch sequencer.
Stutter
A rhythmic capture-and-repeat slicer. Audio is captured into a slice on the host beat grid; that slice is then looped at a rate set by RATE (free ms) or DIVISION (note division). Every loop has its own pitch shift, optional pitch ramp per repeat, decay across repeats, alternating pan, mid-cycle re-capture probability, and 6 rhythmic patterns (even, dotted, triplet, swing, ramp up, ramp down). 14 LINK presets bundle a rate-and-capture pair onto a single knob.
OFF→ON enabling is beat-aligned: the read head rewinds to the start of the current capture cycle, so the first stutter plays past audio (the kick attack, not the trailing decay).
A built-in STUTTER SEQUENCER (64-step) drives RATE or DIVISION per step, host-quantized, with sample-accurate transitions.
bend it
Varispeed
A tape-machine emulation. Continuous capture into a 2-second ring buffer; a single read head plays back at variable rate with mechanical wow/flutter, momentary tape-stop, DJ-style scratch, tanh tape saturation, and a peak-envelope compressor.
Three modes: Forward, Forward-Reverse (bipolar speed knob: centre stopped, left ramps reverse, right ramps forward), and Reverse. The wow and flutter are two recursive sine oscillators (0.5 Hz and 6 Hz) for the irregular pitch wobble of a real transport. Scratch is a ±100% pitch-bend wheel with zero-crossing direction flips.
Slow the tape, the pitch drops. Drop the tempo lever, the pitch drops. The character comes from the modulation, the saturation, and the capture-window rebase that keeps the section rhythmically tied to the host.
The 21-effect FX chain
The FX page is a drag-to-reorder chain of up to 21 distinct colour effects, organised in the UI by category:
Category
Effects
DISTORTION
BITROT (bit crusher)
CIRCUIT BEND (memory-chip glitch)
DISTORT (12-model waveshaper)
EXCITE (Aphex aural exciter)
PLASMA (hysteretic arc discharge)
WAVEFOLDER (west-coast wavefolder)
FILTER
FORMANT (5-band vowel filter)
PRISM (4 topologies: SVF / Moog ladder / 303 diode ladder / "broken" transistor)
SIEVE (Xenakis spectral STFT sieve)
TOOTH (3-comb filter)
RESONATE
CRYSTAL (playable scale-tuned bandpass bank, up to 60 voices)
FREQ SHIFT (Bode SSB shifter)
MODAL (24-mode struck resonator)
MODULATE
CHORUS (4-voice pitch doubler)
ENSEMBLE (BBD-style with 4 historical modes)
FLANGER (with through-zero)
PHASER (up to 12 continuous stages)
DELAY
SPIRAL (stereo tape delay with independent L/R rates, ping-pong, wobble, ducking, taps, reverse)
REVERB
DATTORRO (plate reverb)
DRIP (spring reverb)
DYNAMICS
SQUASH (OTT-style multiband compressor)
master chain
Gain, Mix & Pan
3-band EQ
Compressor
Soft limiter
Auto gain
Animate
The deep modulation surface:
4 modulator columns, each switchable between LFO / RANDOM / E.FOLLOWER.
LFO: 19 shapes (sine, triangle, saws, squares at multiple duties, EXP / LOG / PEAK / VALLEY / BUMP / DBL / SKEW / STAIRS), 11 host-synced rates (1/64 bar to 16 bars), jitter, smoothing.
RANDOM: same rate grid, BIN toggle for stepped vs interpolated output, position-keyed reproducible jitter.
E.FOLLOWER: gain, rise, fall, plus a bipolar TONE that turns the follower into a lowpass version (tracks kicks/bass) or a highpass version (tracks hats/transients).
3 bezier graph editors, each looped over 1/4 bar to 16 bars. Click to add points, drag points and bend handles to shape.
6 target slots per modulator (4 columns + 3 graphs = up to 42 simultaneous destinations). Each slot has MIN / MAX clamps; graph slots additionally have START / END / SKEW for triangular envelope shaping over the curve.
STUTTER SEQ and STRETCH SEQ rows at the top, each a 16-step on/off sequencer with chain 1–4.
Perform
A simpler routing surface aimed at host automation and live performance:
4 host-automatable MACRO knobs, each routable to up to 5 destinations with per-slot triangular response curves (START / END / SKEW / MIN / MAX).
A host-automatable X/Y pad driving
PERFORM_X+PERFORM_Y, each axis routable to up to 5 destinations with the same per-slot curve.
Total mappable destinations across the modulation system: 42 (Animate) + 30 (Perform) = 72 simultaneous modulation destinations.
Who it's for
Producers working with loops and samples who want rhythmic re-edits, glitchy reinterpretations, stutter sequences, time-stretches, and tape-stop fills that lock to the host.
Sound designers who need a place to do granular freezes, modulated resonant ringing, comb-filtered drones, BBD ensembles, plate verbs, and circuit-bent chaos in one tool without bouncing through 8 plugins.
Live performers who want a small surface (4 macros + X/Y pad) that maps to many destinations and shows up cleanly in the DAW's automation lane.
Ambient and experimental musicians who want one plugin that can carry a track from a tape-warble pad to a stuttered hyperpop fill to a sieve-filtered drone to a plate-verb tail without switching tools.
Why use it
One plugin, full sound-design workflow
Most projects need a time engine (slow this, freeze that), a colour chain (saturation, comb, reverb), and a modulation layer (envelope follower into filter cutoff). Tape Fiasco 2 puts all three in one place, at zero latency, with shared modulation. A single instance can be the entire effect path on a track.
Host-synced, host-automatable, host-aware
Every musical timing in the plugin (capture windows, stutter divisions, delay rates, LFO rates, graph periods, sequencer steps) is locked to the host transport when one is present. Every parameter is a normal automation lane. Every macro gesture is recordable. Transport restarts re-arm the sequencer and dry-passthrough windows so the section doesn't open onto silence.
Zero latency, always
No effect uses lookahead. The chain reports 0 samples at the host level. SIEVE is the only effect that runs an FFT and it's a real-time STFT with overlap-add so it adds no latency beyond a frame's inherent group delay.
Built to not click
Every effect uses the same on/off discipline: clear state on enable, smooth wet/dry blend, transport-restart hooks, NaN/inf guards. Specific click-protection patterns include the per-grain latching in Stretch (you can flip reverse mid-grain without clicks), the linear capture-crossfade in Stutter (chosen over equal-power because correlated bar-aligned slices tripped the limiter at the midpoint), the Tukey loop window in BendIt (mid-loop pitch and direction jumps land at silence), and the 10 ms wet/dry bypass fade on every FX in the chain.
Modulation goes anywhere
Every parameter is a modulation target. The same modulator can drive a Time-page slider, an FX-page knob, Master, or any combination.
Two sequencers, not just one
STUTTER Sequencer and STRETCH Sequencer both live on the Animate page, both follow the same shape (16 steps × chain 1–4), and both quantize their step transitions to the host beat grid. The stutter sequencer drives RATE; the stretch sequencer drives SPEED. They run in parallel.
A circuit-bent mode hidden inside Stutter
Flipping the BENDIT button replaces the Stutter section with a buffer mangler whose WARP knob is a 7-zone macro from "barely there" to "DJ scratch." The scratch engine inside it is host-quantized in and out on the 8th-note grid and re-rolls rate, shape, and depth per beat. Different gestures every time, but always on the grid.
Designed end-to-end for performance
The Perform page exposes 6 host-automatable controls that map to up to 30 destinations with triangular response curves. The dimming model means assigned destination knobs lock out manual edits so the macro never fights the user. Macro gestures land directly in the DAW's automation lane.
