Review: Deco from Strymon

In this article, we take an adoring look at the Deco guitar pedal emulation plugin from Strymon.

Guitar pedals are some of the most fun pieces of gear you can have in a studio. As tools of inspiration, some pedals really help spark your imagination when you are a little stuck. Increasingly, amp sims and guitar modelling software are starting to make them less common in studios.

Strymon pedals have always held a special place in pedalboards all over and with their recent foray into turning them into plugins, they are becoming more accessible than ever! After the Big sky, Deco gets its own plugin avatar. Does it do justice to the original? Let us find out!

The new Deco plugin doesn’t just give you the hyper-real sonic signature of these classic tape machines, it’s also unique in that it revives the forgotten art on how these decks were manipulated as a workflow in the studio.

Strymon

Analog to Digital 

If you took the actual pedal and put it through a magic analog to digital plugin converter, this is precisely what you would get! They have mirrored the pedal in to the plugin and added just enough extra buttons and functionality to make it digital friendly. 

Let us start with the very first example of this philosophy. At the very top, there are input and Output knobs with adequately sized meters to help you keep an eye on your levels. Apart from this, you have a choice between two modes – Normal and Studio. While Normal gives you the same gain structuring as the actual pedal would, Studio gives you an extra 10db of headroom to make it easier to handle in a DAW setting. A neat little consideration!

Next you have the two halves of the plugin. The Tape Saturation and the Double Tracker. 

Starting with the Tape Saturation – Saturation, Tone and Volume as well as the choice between two voice types of Classic and Cassette all mirror the pedal itself. The added feature here being a Low Trim knob to clean up your low end (again, very useful). The Classic mode gives you the response and characteristics of a professional 2-track mastering reel to tell machines and the Cassette mode uses auto level control (ALC) process that is commonly found in high-end cassette tape recorders, giving you a much thicker and musically compressed tone.

Next we move on to the Double Tracker. Here you have the same-as-pedal controls which are Blend, Lag time, Wobble and Blend Type. The Digital additions include a very useful Tempo Sync section that helps you get your doubles perfectly in sync (increasingly important in modern music). There is also a Wide Stereo button that gives you an extra wide image with a little bit of Haas effect magic using time delay between the reference deck and lag decks.

Lastly, we have the Auto Flange toggle along with an AF Rate knob that lets you add a little bit of flair and vibe via a flanger that you have an adequate bit of control over. The main controls are self-explanatory but the interesting one is the Blend Type. This lets you have a choice between Summing your two tracks in phase, inverting the phase of the lag track and then summing or the output of the right Lag Deck is bounced to the left channel for stereo ping-pong or mono double-echo. Each of these gives you a very distinct effect and result. 

The restraint in terms of the controls they have added is really great. They all expand functionality just enough to make it relevant for modern music and DAW usage while keeping the magic that we have in the workflow of pedals. 

Pedal away in your digital bike!

Let’s first get the ‘How does it sound?’ question out of the way. Does it sound exactly like its 5 times more expensive real-life counterpart? Not exactly, but it does get very very close. The Tape Saturation is lively and adds a wonderful sheen to in-the-box guitar tones. The way it goes from subtle saturation and tasteful tape compression to syrupy tape overdrive when you push the knob further and further to the right is predictable and satisfying. 

The Double Tracker is a really fun side to it. Why does a double tracker end up next to a saturator? We’ll talk about it below but first – how does it sound? It sounds fantastic! It’s probably my favourite bit of the plugin. The unique way in which you get results really adds to the experience. There are so few controls, that you can go through most of the combinations quite quickly and end up with something that’s fun, unique and high quality. Most importantly, it seems to fit in most, if not all mixes pretty well, especially on guitar tones.

So why are the two next to each other? Well, it is because the whole point of DECO is that it emulates having 2 tape decks and manipulating them for creative effects. This was essentially one of the very first ways in which studio engineers back in the day were able to add effects like chorusing, flanging and echoes/delays. DECO is special because while it does emulate the sound, it is, more importantly, recreating the workflow of manipulating two tape decks. Everything you could do with such a setup, you can do with DECO.

Apart from the saturation, you get to play with the way the two decks Blend to have less or more Double tracking. The Wobble knob adds random tape speed-based modulations to the Lag Deck – just like having a recording engineer vary the speed of the machine by hand. This lets you increase the depth of the modulation effect you hear when Lag Time is set to act as a tape flanger/ chorus, or it can be used to add modulation to the Lag Deck when set as a slapback or tape echo. The Lag Time control adjusts the delay offset between Deco’s Reference Deck and the Lag Deck, achieving everything from tape flanging (-.3 to 3ms), lush tape chorusing (3 to 50ms), proper slap back delay (50 to 150ms), or fully spaced-out tape echoes (150 to 500ms) when the control is maxed out. 

Personal Thoughts

Flash news – It is not something that sounds great on everything. I personally didn’t find it to be too good on certain types of drums and vocals, especially sources with a touch of extra high-end. Deco tends to turn it a little glassy and brittle. If you are looking for the best sounding saturation or double tracker, there are definitely tons out there, like the Decapitator, Micro shift etc. but to have it side-by-side and the workflow that it inspires is pretty great. I personally love it on guitars, synths and backing vocals. It is also great to add a little bit of spice to some transitionary drum elements as well. It is an oddly satisfying and simple plugin that enables you to get creative effects going on most single-source elements, that pop in and out of the mix.

Find out more about Deco from Strymon