Bleass Tides is a new stereo delay plugin for macOS and Windows that allows you to manipulate feedback with colorful multi-effects.
Let’s stay with delays, but we’re leaving the Eurorack world with the new Xaoc Devices Samarkanda and going to in-the-box music production. One advantage of software delay is that developers can pack even more features in a plugin than in modules.
This is also the case with the new Bleass Tides delay processor for macOS, Windows, and iOS.
Bleass Tides
Tides is a new stereo delay plugin with a deep explorative engine. At its core, Bleass Tides consists of a fully customizable stereo delay with various parameters.
Before the signal enters the delay, you can shape it with lowpass and highpass filtering, with cutoff and resonance controls for each band. The next step is the stereo delay, with control over the inertia, time, and optional ping-pong mode with classic and symmetric operation modes.
Inertia sets the time it takes for any change in delay time to be applied and how the change will be applied. In response to delay time changes, you choose between a crossfade and a tape-style mode with slow-down or speed-up. Additionally, you can determine the feedback amount and work with freeze and mute (kill) functions.
Things get more exciting in the second tab of Bleass Tides. Here, you can color the delay’s feedback with multiple effects. This allows you to create a variety of other delay-based effects.
Colorful Feedback
You have five slots that you can fill with effects as you wish. It includes a multi-type distortion, a random digital noise FX (dust), bit-crusher, frequency shifter, pitch shifter for granular effects, ring modulator, delay, multimode filters (highpass, lowpass, bandpass), and peak filter.
Each effect can be adjusted in detail. For example, the pitch shifter gives you control over the grain size and pitch. Depending on the combination, you can create unique delays ranging from stereo chorus and crunchy dirty delay to granular FX.
Not complex enough? No problem! Bleass Tides also has a mighty modulation engine that levels its sonic mangling capabilities.
You can work with three multi-wave LFOs with advanced features (phase, offset, etc.), two envelope followers, and two macro controls. Each modulator is mappable to four destinations simultaneously, each with different settings.
If you mix the delays with the effects and a good portion of modulation, you can achieve lovely, complex delays. Bleass Tides ships with a good range of factory presets, showcasing the capabilities.
A fun one is “Beat Repeat,” which gives you glitchy beat repeated delays archived by modulating parameters like the volume slider. All of this is super easy and clearly programmable via the well-known, colorful Bleass user interface.
First Impression
Bleass sent me a preview version so I could take a closer look at the new plugin. I like a lot the concept and implementation. It’s incredibly easy to use and fun to experiment with. Tides offers a huge range of mangling fun. Big plus also for the iOS version.
A few minor criticisms are that there’s no global FX on/off switch, and some presets go too far in the extremes. Especially when you go through the presets, you’re bound to encounter one or the other noisy surprises on your speakers. Tip: do not turn the volume up too high.
Bleass Tides is available now for 39€. It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. The iOS (iPhone/iPad) version with AUv3 support is now on the Apple AppStore for $14,99/14,99€
More information here: Bleass
