Late Replies is a creative delay and reverb plug-in that also acts as a powerful multi effects processor to create all sorts of time-based effects, as you can see in the following video below.

Despite so much power at hand, this plug-in was designed to make the learning curve as smooth as possible. Let’s see in this tutorial how to get started with the one and only plug-in that lets you create all sorts of delays and reverbs!

1. Browse Simple Delay Presets in Easy Mode

The plug-in is delivered with hundreds of presets that both show the capabilities of the plug-in, and provide a great starting point for many effects.

Click in the “EZ” mode icon in the plug-in toolbar to switch to “easy mode”:

Open the presets browser on the “Main” tab:

You can now load presets and adapt the main parameters quickly, like with any simple “regular” delay plug-in or pedal:

Look into the Echo and Ping Pong presets categories to find all sort of mono or stereo delays with particular tones: analog or tape delays, distorted or modulated delays, vintage digital delays with or without aliasing… More than just factory settings, these presets can be considered as multiple delay plug-ins with their own tone.

You can lock the delay setting (if you want to keep the same delay time and just change the tone of the delay when new presets are loaded:

The dry and wet levels can also be locked (with their own lock icon) to remain unchanged when loading another delay preset.

With this setup, you can use Late Replies as a very simple delay plug-in, yet with a very large palette of usual or more unusual tones: each “preset” is like a different delay plug-in!

2. Load More Advanced Presets (EZ Mode)

Once you have explored all the “basic” presets, you can go a step further. Keep the easy mode for now, and go to the other presets folders:

You will now want to remove the delay setting lock because more advanced presets may definitely sound better with the original delay settings, especially the advanced patterns and reverbs (but you can still adjust them afterwards)!

This gives you access to a large range of incredible effects, without having to understand anything about the plug-in, and yet adapt the various parameters easily to your exact needs!

3. Combine Sub-Presets (EZ Mode)

Still in easy mode, you can now explore and combine sub-presets together to build your own effects. Late Replies is delivered with hundreds of sub-presets for the pattern and feedback loops modules. You can also load presets for the pre and post effects. Just ignore the individual L1 and L2 presets at this stage:

All you need to know is that the chain is Pre-FX, then pattern, then feedback loops, then post-FX, and that this only affects the wet signal (dry remains dry, all the time!). You can use these presets as building blocks chained together, and create thousands of effects by just combining them together, as you would do with effect pedals or racks:

You can still adapt the main delay settings in the user interface so that the produced effect precisely fits your need.

4. Learn From Presets With Full Editor

So you have now explored many of the capabilities of the plug-in just with presets and sub-presets, without getting much into the plug-in yet… It is time to launch the full editor (click on the “EZ” button again to deactivate the easy mode)!

If you have not done it yet, read the manual to get a better understanding of the user interface and the workflow of the plug-in, and watch some of the Late Replies videos that explain in details the features of the plug-in.

Ready to go? You can now load the presets and sub-presets that you liked in previous steps, and observe how they are built, how they affect the tone when combined together. You can also open the built-in plug-ins to adjust their settings and hear how they influence the tone. You are also allowed to load the individual L1 and L2 presets, now that you can see how they both interact with each other!

You can also replace some effects by others or move them around with drag and drop. No need to load third party plug-ins at this stage yet. Let’s keep it simple :-).

5. The Sky Is The Limit

After a couple of minutes, hours, days or weeks trying things out, you should now be an expert capable of starting building presets from scratch (or sub-presets) and load your favorite third party plug-ins and see how they integrate with Late Replies. There is no rule, so you can keep experimenting until you get what yo are looking for, or simply get surprised by the tones that you can create!

By the way, as you may have seen in some factory presets, Late Replies can load itself into itself… Just sayin’… And feel free to combine several instances in series or parallel to get more power!

To give you an idea, here is a little experimentation we did some time ago with just 3 instances of the plug-in on a single note:

And once you have built crazy presets with the full editor, don’t forget that you can switch back to easy mode anytime, to keep things simple and enjoy the new effects you have created, without getting lost into the details!

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