Magnetic tape varispeed. The reel, taped down to a plugin. Slow it, speed it, and run anything through a real tape machine.
From the makers of Roomtone, played by 4,000+ guitarists
Lifetime free updates · Mac & Windows · VST3, AU, Standalone
Works in every major DAW except Pro Tools (no AAX). 14-day refund policy.
Tape speed shifted in realtime on guitar, vocals and synths, plus how far the tape degradation goes. Three minutes, mostly sound.
Real renders through the plugin, factory presets plus a few custom settings. Nothing loads until you press play.
Mac & Windows · VST3, AU, Standalone · 14-day refund policy
A realtime tape varispeed wrapped in a full magnetic-tape machine. Half speed to double speed, 12 semitones each way, pristine to falling apart.
The hero. Realtime varispeed on a Lanczos-8 windowed-sinc kernel, so pitch and time bend clean at any speed. LED shows percent and semitones, with a 35 ms reel glide. At 0% it passes through bit-faithfully.
One switch from a clean, aligned deck to a tired reel. Scales dropouts, print-through, hiss floor and transport wobble together.
Physically-modelled wow and flutter with scrape resonance. Subtle drift or seasick warble, scaled by the tape condition.
Latency-compensated dry/wet so you can blend tape onto a bus, a final trim, and a click-free IN engage.
The SPEED knob shifts pitch and time from -50 to +100 percent, half speed to double speed, like slowing or speeding a real reel. Built on a Lanczos-8 windowed-sinc kernel that anti-aliases at any speed, running as a dual-tap tape-head shifter so it works as an insert.
Jiles-Atherton hysteresis saturation at 8x oversampling, lifted from Northern Valley Audio's tape-studio master path and tuned for the plugin. Level-dependent HF self-erasure and head-bump tone at 15 ips. Not a tanh curve pretending to be tape.
Modelled from real transport mechanics, not an LFO on pitch. Scrape resonance, modulation noise and drift that move the way a worn reel actually moves.
Age the whole machine with one control. Dropouts, print-through, hiss and transport wobble all scale together, from a pristine deck to a falling-apart cassette.
At 0% speed the taps park and the varispeed engine passes audio through bit-for-bit with constant, reported latency, so the tape color is all you hear. Blend tape in with the latency-compensated dry/wet mix without smearing your source.
Full mono and stereo support. Shows up on both mono and stereo tracks in Logic, Ableton, Studio One, Reaper, FL Studio, and Cubase. Pro Tools is not supported (it requires AAX). Universal binary on Mac.
Parallel send effects on the tape path: a tape echo that repeats through the same saturation and wobble as everything else, and a space reverb for room and depth. Blend either in with its own send, so you can go from a dry varispeed pitch trick to a fully washed-out tape print without leaving the plugin.
Pull SPEED down a few percent for that woozy, slightly-flat indie guitar sag, or push it up for tight, sped-up jangle. Add a worn tape condition and it sounds like it was printed to a real deck.
The classic varispeed vocal trick, in realtime. Drop it an octave-ish for slowed, syrupy takes, or crank it up for chipmunk hooks. Wow and flutter add the tape warble on top.
Leave SPEED at 0 and use it as a pure tape machine. Saturation, head-bump and a touch of Old condition glue and age a full mix, with the mix knob for how much tape you want.
Ride the SPEED knob for tape-stop rundowns and pitch dives, or park it worn-and-slow for lo-fi beats and vaporwave. The 35 ms reel glide makes the sweeps feel like a real motor.
Chasing that lo-fi indie sound? Pair Taped Down with 4TRK (cassette 4-track saturation), Roomtone Amp Sim (indie amp tones), and CST-1 (vintage BBD chorus and vibrato) for the full chain.
Varispeed is the studio trick of changing a tape machine's playback speed. Slowing the tape drops the pitch and stretches time; speeding it up raises the pitch. Producers have used it for decades for detuned guitars, chipmunk or slowed vocals, half-speed solos and tape-stop effects. Taped Down does it in realtime as an insert, clean and anti-aliased at any speed, and passes through bit-faithfully at 0%.
Most tape plugins only add color. Taped Down does that too, but its centerpiece is a genuine varispeed that changes pitch and time like a real reel. The tape engine is extracted from Northern Valley Audio's tape-studio master path: Jiles-Atherton saturation at 8x oversampling, HF self-erasure, head-bump tone at 15 ips, and physically-modelled wow and flutter. It is a tape machine you can slow down and speed up, not just a saturation box.
Old, Worn and New set how beat-up the tape and transport are. New is a clean, aligned machine. Worn adds wobble, hiss and the odd dropout. Old is a tired reel with heavy flutter, print-through, dropouts and a higher noise floor. It scales all of those together, so one switch goes from pristine to falling apart.
Anything. On guitars and synths the varispeed gives detuned, dreamy, half-speed and sped-up textures. On vocals it does tape-flutter warble and pitch effects. On drums and full mixes the tape engine glues and degrades, and a touch of Old condition instantly ages a track. Latency-compensated dry/wet lets you blend it on a bus. Mono and stereo supported.
Yes. Taped Down is available now for both Mac (universal binary, VST3, AU and Standalone, covering Intel and Apple Silicon) and Windows (VST3 and Standalone).
Yes. Updates are free for everyone who buys Taped Down. Our other plugins (Roomtone Amp Sim, 4TRK, CST-1, DV-1) have shipped multiple post-launch updates with new features and DSP refinements. There is no subscription and no upgrade fee.
New to the technique? Read What Is Tape Varispeed? The Slowed-Down, Sped-Up Tape Trick, Explained, and see how tape speed shaped the classic cassette 4-track recorders that inspired our plugins.