TAPE FIASCO Review: FREE Glitch effect

Tape Fiasco is a free glitch effect playground from Jonas Erikson. When I first saw this plugin I had to download it and give it a spin. Obviously the main draw is the fantastic UI. From a workflow perspective, it’s not amazing, perhaps on a touch device it is more pleasant, but from a creative perspective the interface invites exploration playfulness. Unique shapes litter the interface in a neat black and white grid, the designs remind me of Fors plugins such as Tela, but even a bit more abstract. You’re still presented with parameter names and values while hovering, but the general design pushes you away from settings you may typically reach for.

There’s three sections, a time stretching effect, a stutter, and a tape warble. The time stretch is a simple granular stretcher there’s controls for grain density and spread as well as pitch. The stutter is a classic CD skip style stutter, but with some cool envelopes to shift the pitch with each repeat. The vinyl effect is fun because it has a manual scratch control. As you dig around Tape Fiasco you’ll find a few hidden modes, routing and even an envelope that can be routed to various controls. I’m not sure exactly how this envelope works, or if it has anything to do with the ducking control, but it’s nice to see there’s a bit more than first meets the eyes.

This is definitely more of a fun plugin, I’m not sure if this one can really replace anything else in my collection, but I can’t help but want to break it out just for the UI alone. I had a lot of fun randomizing all the controls with Bitwig’s modulation and just letting it generate chaotic glitches. If any plugin needed a “randomize” button, it is this one. I think this is a lovely plugin, I enjoy fun new designs like this, especially considering it is free. I’ll probably just save the auto-randomizer preset I made as the default and just load this one up whenever I want glitchy chaos.

You can pick up Tape Fiasco for free here: https://www.erikssonjonas.com/tapefiasco (note that mac users will need to follow the included install instructions)