TAPE MELLO-FI Review

Arturia’s Tape Mello-fi is a fairly simple plugin, it pretty much only does one thing, but it does it quite well. That is, as the name suggests, tape emulation. Tape Mello-fi has two main sections, a basic preamp, with drive, tone and noise, and a tape section for emulating physical tape artifacts. The drive in the preamp is serviceable, with a tone adjustment for adding or removing brightness. While it isn’t bad, I’m not opening Tape Mello-fi for the preamp section.

The main appeal here is the tape section, which includes flutter and wow for emulating tape warble, mechanics, which loops audio of physical tape mechanics, and a tape stop effect for that classic wind down sound. The mechanics might be nice for adding some ambience and texture, but I often turn it off. There’s really one knob here that justifies this entire review, the “wear” control, which emulates tape wear and age. I’m not sure what it is exactly, perhaps noise modulation and a particular distortion curve, it seems to really wreck the audio in a very pleasing way. The wear control adds texture and break up, a little top end fizzle, and even a bit of pitch modulation, all without sounding too hissy or blowing out the lows like many distortions can.

I often break out Tape Mello-fi for this single control, it’s a nice way to get “analog” texture and grit. It’s just a nice option when a sound needs that extra little touch. It can be a pretty noticeable effect, so I’d opt to use it on sounds you’d prefer to cut in the mix, leads are perfect, a bit of fuzz on bass to get it to stand out, or for adding grit to drums. While we’re on the subject of tape effects, one thing you can do with Tape Mello-fi is run it parallel, or in a container with 50% dry/wet mix. Keep all settings neutral, and play with the wow/flutter controls to get some very pleasing chorus/flanging effects. This can technically be done with any tape/vinyl effect that has warble emulation, but it’s still a fun effect.