23DSP have released 23ArpDelay, available for €15.00.
23ArpDelay is a delay that plays the scale back to you. Feed it one note and the repeats climb a major scale. Feed it a chord and each tap lands somewhere else in the key. The pitch of every tap is measured from whatever you played, so nothing has to be told what key the track is in — move the part up a fifth and the pattern follows it.
The Pattern Builder
Four dropdowns and two sliders decide what all the taps do at once:
- Shape — Rising Steps, Valley, Arch, Spread Wide, Octave Jumps or Scatter.
- Scale — major, natural minor, the modes, pentatonic major and minor, blues, whole tone, chromatic.
- Motion — Up, Down, Up-Down, Down-Up, Random, Converge, Diverge, Skip.
- Spacing — scale degrees, thirds, fourths, fifths or octaves.
- Taps up to sixteen, over one to four octaves.
Change the scale and the whole pattern requantises under your hands. The graph in the middle of the window shows the result before you play a note: one dot per tap, its height the interval, its stem the timing.
Or edit One Tap At A Time
Click a dot and the panel on the right belongs to that tap: level, interval in semitones, stereo position, a filter with cutoff and resonance, its own subdivision or free time in milliseconds, mute, and reverse. Drag a dot in the graph and the tap you moved snaps to the nearest note in the current scale, so an edit by hand stays in key
The pitch shifting
Each tap is shifted by its own phase vocoder, per channel. Two things follow from that, and both matter more than the description sounds:
- Level does not change with the shift. A tap two octaves up is as loud as a tap at unison, so a wide pattern does not need rebalancing every time you change it.
- Pitched and unpitched taps land on the same beat. The delay compensates each tap for the shifter’s own latency, so a pattern that mixes plain repeats with pitched ones stays in time
A tap set to no shift skips the shifter completely. It carries no frame latency and reaches any delay time down to a single sample, which is why this works as an ordinary short delay when you want one. There is a Formant mode for material where the shift starts to sound like a chipmunk, and a soft-clipped feedback path that stays bounded at any combination of Repeats and resonance you can dial in.
MIDI, if you want it
Follow MIDI takes the reference note from the notes you play, so the note names on the graph match the part. MIDI Output sends the arpeggio on as MIDI: incoming notes come out arpeggiated through the current intervals and timings, ready for another instrument. Neither is required — the plugin is an audio effect first and does not need MIDI to work
24 presets
In five categories — Rhythmic, Melodic, Ambient, Texture, Extreme — each with a line saying what it is for. Dotted Runner is the dotted-eighth trick that makes a simple riff sound busy. Glass Halo and Held Breath are for pads. Runaway Stack and Chromatic Fall are for when you want the delay to take over. Save your own, import and export them as files, and undo covers the lot.
In the session
- Sync to host tempo, or set free times in milliseconds per tap.
- Tail Shape sets how the repeats decay: linear, exponential or logarithmic.
- Stereo spread as Center, Alternating, Wide, or panned by hand per tap.
- Undo and redo, a preset browser you can search by name, category or tag, and a light theme.
23ArpDelay is available to PC, Mac and Linux users (VST3, AU and LV2).
For more information on 23ArpDelay, click here:
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