How to use Reel · The manual

At a glance MT-05

Reel is a tape machine with four character knobs and a transport. Warmth is saturation, Age is high-end wear, Wobble is wow and flutter, Dust is crackle and hiss. Mix and Trim finish it.

Everything at zero is a true null: with the four words at rest, STOP released and Trim at 0 dB, Reel passes audio through bit for bit. It does exactly nothing until asked.

Signal path Signal, not screenshot

in ─→ Warmth ─→ Wobble ─→ Age ─→ Dust ─→ Stop ─→ Mix ─→ Trim ─→ out
      (sat)      (w & f)    (tone)   (grit)   (brake)

Set up From insert to first sound

01 Insert Reel on a track or bus. It is an audio effect: no routing to think about.
02 Start with everything at zero. The plugin is passing audio through untouched.
03 Bring up WARMTH first for colour, then AGE for the top end. Add WOBBLE and DUST last, in small amounts.
04 Choose a SPEED: 15 ips is the neutral reference; 7.5 is darker and looser; 30 is the clean, fast reel.

The controls Every parameter

The four words

WARMTH 0 … 1: Tape saturation. It is level-compensated at a -6 dBFS reference, so it is not a volume knob, and it blends in from nothing so it fades up smoothly.
AGE 0 … 1: High-end wear: a rolloff that sweeps from 20 kHz down to about 4 kHz, plus a small head-bump low shelf for weight.
WOBBLE 0 … 1: Wow and flutter: a slow wow, a faster flutter whose rate drifts, both depths set by the knob. It engages through a short crossfade, so automating it up from zero never clicks.
DUST 0 … 1: Crackle and hiss: sparse ticks that get denser as you turn it up, over a hiss bed that stays faintly alive and swells with the program.

The transport

SPEED 7.5 · 15 · 30 ips: Recolours the head and transport the way a real machine does. Half speed rolls the top off an octave lower, grows the head bump, slows and deepens the wobble, and doubles the hiss; 30 ips halves the hiss and lightens the wear. 15 ips is the neutral reference. The crackle does not scale with speed: ticks are wear, not speed.
STOP momentary: A tape brake. Hold it and the machine winds down over about 1.6 seconds, the pitch diving as the level follows the head speed; release and it spins back up over about 0.45 seconds and re-laces cleanly. The machine is always recording its 2.5 seconds of tape, so a press always has something behind it. Automate it for endings and transitions.

Output

MIX 0 … 1: Dry to wet, for parallel colour. It sits at fully wet by default.
TRIM -12 … +12 dB: Output level trim.
WOBBLE RATE 0.25x … 4.00x: Scales the speed of both the wow and the flutter LFOs, quarter speed to four times, 1.00x out of the box. Depth stays with WOBBLE; this is how fast the tape breathes.

First five minutes A short walkthrough

01 Insert Reel and play the track with everything at zero. It sounds identical: that is the null.
02 Raise WARMTH until the track thickens, watching the output VU lean into the clay end.
03 Add AGE for the top-end roll and a little low-end weight.
04 Set a small WOBBLE and a trace of DUST for movement and air.
05 Hold STOP at the end of a phrase, or automate it, to hear the machine wind down.

Recipes Named workflows

Glue on a mix bus

01 Insert Reel on the bus and set SPEED to 15 ips.
02 Bring WARMTH up until the peaks round off, keeping the change subtle.
03 Pull MIX back to blend the colour under the dry mix, and trim with TRIM if the level crept up.

Lo-fi loop

01 Choose 7.5 ips for the darker, looser machine.
02 Push AGE and WOBBLE for a worn, drifting top end, and add DUST for crackle.
03 Ride WARMTH to taste; the loop should sound like it has been played a hundred times.

A tape stop ending

01 Automate STOP to switch on at the last bar.
02 Let the wind-down carry the pitch and level down over its 1.6 seconds.
03 Release it, or end the automation, so the machine re-laces cleanly if the part continues.

Good to know The fine print

Zero is a true null at every SPEED. Speed only recolours stages that are already engaged, so it cannot make sound out of a bypass.
WARMTH and the brake are speed-independent. Half speed is darker, hissier and wobblier, but it is not warmer, and a tape stop takes the same time at 7.5 as at 30 ips.
The wobble is common to both channels, so the stereo image does not wander as it drifts. It is movement in pitch, not a widener.
There is no oversampling and no reported latency; WOBBLE carries a couple of milliseconds of pitch modulation by design, which is movement, not a fixed offset. The brake’s 2.5 seconds of tape is reported to the host as tail, so a bounce never truncates a wind-down. The drive is bounded by design, so WARMTH stays musical rather than turning to fizz at the top.
Every instance hisses on its own. The dust and the flutter drift are reseeded per instance, so Reel on four tracks is four different tapes, not one correlated hiss that stacks up and pulls to the centre.
Every plugin in the suite maps the same way: click the MIDI chip in the header (it reads MIDI, MIDI · N, or MIDI · OFF) and the editor dims into learn mode with a balloon on every mappable control, plus ENABLE MIDI per instance, ALL PARAMETERS..., CLEAR ALL and DONE (Esc works too). One CC drives one parameter, on any channel, saved the moment you map it; switches and short lists step relative to the knob. The window also resizes from its corner.