In recent years, French company Arturia have steadily been growing their collection of effects plug‑ins, and I use some of them on my mixes quite regularly. In particular, I like their spring reverb and EHX Memory Man emulation, but when I heard legendary analogue tape aficionado Eric Valentine describe the release I’m writing about here as the best software tape plug‑in he’d come across, my interest was truly piqued — I have a lot of respect for Eric’s work, and he still maintains and uses his vintage tape machines.
I won’t attempt an in‑depth history of the Studer J37 here, but it’s safe to say this one‑inch, four‑track, valve‑amplified open‑reel tape machine has left its mark in the history books of recording technology, not least through its connection with the Beatles’ St Pepper sessions. Its modular design was innovative at the time, and it employed more than 50 vacuum tubes. The specific machine that Arturia chose to model spent most of its working life in Studio Barclay, which Arturia describe as the “Abbey Road of French music”. Using a “neural‑based modelling framework and conducting painstaking multi‑stage measurements”, Arturia claim to have captured the “exact interactions, harmonics and ‘tape states’ that define the Studer J37’s distinctive sound”.
Arturia’s Tape J‑37 plug‑in sports a good‑looking GUI with a nicely laid‑out selection of controls, and there’s enough control under the hood to permit a useful amount of tweaking too. The Color section is perhaps the most significant, offering a sonic choice ranging from a ‘pristine’ tape emulation, with ‘new’ SM911 tape loaded onto the machine, to SM468 tape at various stages of its life cycle. All these options can be driven into saturation using the Drive control, but the grittiest and dirtiest options will take you more into outright disruption territory — in a good way, if that’s the effect you’re after. Despite some jumps in level that sometimes made critical judgment a little tricky, I always found it enjoyable switching between these options. Unlike with many tape emulations I’ve used, you can hear clear, audible differences, so it’s easy to make quick decisions and move on. That this plug‑in doesn’t feature a wet/dry control may frustrate some, but really, I found that the Drive control was all I needed and didn’t find that a problem in use — and you could always use it as a send effect, of course.
I particularly like the ‘emphasis’ options, which allow you to steer the obvious tape saturation effects toward or away from, for example, the low‑end.
The EQ section plays a big part in how effectively this plug‑in performs, and the ability to place it either before or after the tape component offers some subtly distinct tonal options. Hitting EQ before the tape, for example, could sometimes seem more forgiving. I particularly like the Emphasis options, which allow you to steer the obvious tape saturation effects toward or away from, for example, the low‑end.
The Delay section adds yet another layer of creative tinkering, and is intended to mimic the well‑known tape‑echo effects that were created with such machines before digital effects came along. I found myself using this section more and more during the review period, in fact; it has just the right amount of control options to get things just as you want while you quickly move through a mix.
Finally, I was pleased to note that the Noise and Wobble options seem to be turned off as standard! But they can be easily brought back in to taste if you’re looking for a more authentic model of an older or poorly maintained tape machine.
I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Eric Valentine’s assessment of this plug‑in — put simply, I’ve used a lot of tape emulation plug‑ins, and Tape J‑37 is the most effective I’ve heard to date. It’s a plug‑in I can happily put on a guitar or drum bus and immediately find more agreeable, in a way that’s really hard to articulate. Then there are the more creative options for adding more obvious tape character or delay effects. All in all, this plug‑in is definitely worth considering, and there’s a demo available to help you decide.