FabFilter Timeless 2 delay [Review]

The FabFilter Timeless 2 delay was originally released in 2009, and has gotten rave reviews ever since. I thought it only fitting to review it now because of their 10 day celebration sale (April 14-24, 2014) in honor of their 10th anniversary. The sale covers all their plugins and starts at 40% off, so you definitely won’t want to miss this one. We will also be reviewing their Pro-MB multiband compressor, so keep an eye out for that.

This delay really does it all. Anything from Mid-Side processing to insane modulation effects, it’s all at your fingertips with the sexy, sleek, and creative GUI!

An innovative idea that FabFilter has come up is how it’s laid out. You have your main plug in window with your standard delay parameters: input, time (sync-able to host), feedback, and pan. But it doesn’t just end there though. FabFilter also placed a cross-feedback knob, which sends right signal to the left side and vice versa, the amount being independent for each side. They have the new “freeze” feature, which takes the sound that is currently being delayed and loops it for infinity, or until you turn the freeze button off. And of course, they also have a couple of wonderful filters towards the end of the delay chain so you have even more tonal control!

Moving past the first section of the plugin, there’s a small tab at the bottom. When you click on that, it opens up your modulation effects and routing for the expanded section of XY pads. Their creative way of using click-and-drag to manually assign your routing was very intuitive and looked very clean.

Expanding the plug-in even more on the right side will open up your fine controls for the two filters, as well as types and styles which are also each independent!

I planned on spending a short amount of time with this plug-in to run it through it’s paces, and got totally lost in the creative process that it inspired. Needless to say, I spent way too much time having fun with it! This delay can sound anywhere from beautiful and clean to gnarly, distorted, or psychedelic. I will say that the amount of controls is slightly overwhelming for the first few minutes if you haven’t seen it before, but if you take it slow and read the AWESOME help pop-ups (Thank you, FabFilter!), you will definitely be using this delay more and more often!