PreSonus Blog

Vibrato is kind of the forgotten effect. It appeared briefly in Magnatone guitar amps many (many) decades ago, and some effects add it in a way that seems like an afterthought (“Hey, if we include a switch to turn off the dry signal in this flanger, then we’ll get vibrato!”). In fact it’s such a forgotten effect that when I use it on sustained sources like pads and power chords, people often want to know what “that cool new effect” is.

If a program doesn’t have a vibrato plug-in, the usual option is to trick a flanger or chorus into thinking it’s one. However, Studio One’s Flanger and Chorus are designed to give the lush sounds we associate with those effects, so it’s not possible to obtain true vibrato. However, there is a way to do vibrato with the Analog Delay.

The patch is quite simple. Here are the parameter settings.

Time (Beats section): Turn off sync, and enter 1.5 ms. This will delay the audio by 1.5 ms, but that’s only as much as moving your head 18 inches away from a speaker…I can cope.

Set Factor = 1.00, and Inertia = 0.00. Turn Low Cut and High Cut off. Set Feedback and Saturation to 0, and Mix to 100%.

Mod controls the vibrato depth. A maximum of about 37% works for me. If the depth isn’t enough, then enter 2 or 3 ms for the Time parameter. You’ll want the Sine waveform, but the LFO Beats control setting requires some explanation.

With Sync disabled, you can’t increase the LFO rate beyond 5 Hz. Although this will work as vibrato in some cases, generally, you’ll want to be able to go faster. No problem: Turn on Sync, and then you can obtain faster speeds by choosing faster sync values, like 1/8T or 1/16 at 120 BPM.

And that’s all there is to obtaining real vibrato effects with Studio One.