Choosing The Right Delay Plugin For Your Workflow

There are approximately four hundred thousand delay plugins in the world right now, give or take a few hundred thousand. Everybody and their dog has one. So naturally, we have two (or six, or possibly 30+, depending on how you count.)

The question we get asked most often about our delay products (after "will you bring back Ronin," the answer to which is "probably not, but never say never") is "what's the difference between Dubstation 2 and Other Desert Cities, and which one should I buy?" This is a fair question, because on the surface they are both delay plugins made by the same two people using the same framework and sold on the same website. But they are, in practice, very different instruments designed for very different purposes, and which one you want depends entirely on what you're trying to do with it.

Dubstation 2 is our workhorse. It has been the go-to dub delay plugin for nearly a quarter century now, and has shown up in thousands of commercial productions. We're not name droppers, but we know for a fact it is a key element of the live vocal sound of an extremely well-known artist. It does one thing — bucket-brigade delay emulation — and it does it extremely well. If you need a warm, saturated delay that sits in a mix without making a fuss, Dubstation 2 is the one. Tempo sync, ping-pong, LFO modulation for chorusing and pitch sweeps, a saturation circuit that goes from subtle to genuinely unpleasant, and a loop mode for when you want it to just hold a sound forever. It is twenty-five dollars, and for that twenty-five dollars you get a delay plugin you will use on nearly everything you make.

The typical Dubstation 2 user is someone who needs a delay on an aux bus that sounds good and stays out of the way. Dub, reggae, electronic, ambient, pop — it doesn't matter. It's the delay equivalent of a good cast iron pan. You don't think about it. You just use it.

Other Desert Cities is an entirely different animal. Where Dubstation 2 is a single-algorithm delay that excels at one thing, ODC is six delay algorithms in a trenchcoat pretending to be one plugin. Desert Shores is your standard dual delay. Mecca plays your repeats backwards. Cactus gives you a pair of tape delays with individual speed controls. Thermal is a dual multi-tap. Mirage is what would happen if a tape delay and a VCR had a baby. And Sky Valley is a granular pitch-shifting delay that can get genuinely weird in a hurry.

On top of that, ODC has a full modulation system: two tempo-synced LFOs and an envelope follower that can modulate nearly every control in the interface. It has a diffusor for smearing the feedback path into reverb territory. And its I/O section is, frankly, its secret weapon; every aspect of the gain structure can be controlled and modulated, which means you can duck, pan, and envelope the delay signal in ways that most delays simply can't do without external routing.

The typical Other Desert Cities user is someone who wants to spend an afternoon exploring. Sound designers. Ambient producers. People who use delay as a creative tool rather than a mix tool. If you are the kind of person who reads the words "granular pitch-shifting delay" and feels a tingle in your spine, ODC is for you.

So, the short version: if you need a delay that sounds great and does its job without a lot of fuss, get Dubstation 2. If you need a delay that is also a sound design playground, get Other Desert Cities. If you need both of those things (and in my experience, most people do) buy both of them, because they complement each other extremely well and you'll end up using them for completely different purposes.

Chris Randall
Bellows Falls, Vermont