Lo-Fi Space is a stellar, free, vintage effects unit from Waves that is phenomenal for creating distorted reverbs and delays. Use it for sound design, and re-sample to create something entirely new, or just slap it on slightly for a little Lofi character!
- Internally saturated echo that sounds gritty & full of charm.
- Two reverb styles to choose from, Spring and plate.
- Filters included for echo & reverb sculpting.
- 50+ professional artist-created presets
- (for us) The echo is a little too distorted/saturated.
Contents
Cons
❌ (for us) The echo is a little too distorted/saturated.
Pros
✅ Internally saturated echo that sounds gritty & full of charm.
✅ Two reverb styles to choose from, Spring & Plate.
✅ Filters included for echo & reverb sculpting
✅ 50+ professional artist created presets.
✅ Completely FREE!
What Is Waves Lo-Fi Space?
Compatibility: Win, Mac, 64-bit, AU, AAX, VST, VST3
Waves Lo-Fi Space is Waves’ free plugin for the Black Friday plugin deals period 2021.
It’s a free Lo-Fi plugin that almost looks like something out of a graphic novel, and includes some awesome effects like:
- Echo with BPM, sync & ping pong
- Reverb, with spring or plate options
- Low pass & high pass filters
- A “slim” filter
Lo-Fi Space is an incredible plugin, that includes all the basics you need to add vintage colour and warmth to any sample, recording, or MIDI instrument you put it on.
It seems to focus more on adding grit, and distortion to your signal, rather than providing the warping style effects you get from other vintage FX units like RC-20.
One of our favourite things to do in this plugin is play around with the automation on the echo, and the time. This creates some amazing, warping & wonky sounds, that can be re-sampled, then re-sampled again, and used for texture-rich sound design.
How Does It Sound?
Lo-Fi Space is the perfect plugin for adding vintage, colour and warmth to your samples, recordings, and is even great to use as a sound design tool. It provides more of a distorted lofi sound, which can be great for injecting grit into your recordings.
The Reverb & Echo sound cranky and distorted, and the filters are a welcome addition that can slot your reverb & echo sound into certain parts of the spectrum.
But rather than tell you how great it sounds, we feel it’s best to leave some sound examples, so we left this video below.
Features of Lo-Fi Space
In this part of the review we’ll cover the features of Lo-Fi Space, and what you get for free, in the all new, Waves’ Black Friday plugin.
Echo
At the top of the plugin you’ll find an echo module. Using this module, you can add weird & wonky delays, and echoes to your samples.
As you’d expect it’s not a clean echo, and adds a lot of character to sounds. It’s more of a distorted, broken-style sound that Lo-Fi Space injects into your recordings.
It differs quite a lot from stock delays & echoes, and produces a sound similar to what you’d hear from poor, built-in, tape cassette speakers, which would make sense, seeing as Waves have included a triple A battery hatch in the corner of the plugin.
Waves gave us a short description of what’s going on under the hood with the echo.
What’s happening is, the delay is being internally saturated, creating a gritty, distorted sound, that almost sounds similar to a battery powered speaker.
On the echo you can alter things like delay time, echo amount, and there’s a switch to add a ping pong effect.
There’s also options to lock the BPM to your DAW host tempo, change to milliseconds, or just straight BPM.
Reverb
Under the echo, you’ll find a reverb unit.
Again, it’s a fairly simple unit that has two different algorithms to choose from:
- Plate
- Spring
There’s most of what you’d expect from a basic reverb unit here, and you can alter things like the length in timed format, and the level of your reverb in db.
Like the echo, the reverb unit is modelling some kind of battery powered, unit that is supposed to sound all kinds of distorted, and wonky.
Between the two reverb settings, EQ damping is being applied.
There’s no mix amount for just the reverb, which is a bit of a pain, but there is a mix knob for the entire effect of the lo-fi plugin. And, Lo-Fi Space is entirely free, so you can’t really complain about this, considering the awesome sound you get from it.
Filters
Under the reverb, in the left corner of Lo-Fi space, you’ll also get access to a filter section, that includes low & high pass filters, as well as an option to change from stereo to mono.
These are filters that control your delay and reverb, meaning you can scoop out the lows or highs of your delays/verb if they don’t sound too nice in those regions.
There’s also a mix knob which controls how much Lo-Fi space affects your entire sound.
The filters are useful to automate and create transitions, and the mix knob can even be used alongside other automation to create awesome, warping build-ups, cutting them as the chorus drops.
User Interface
The user interface on Lo-Fi Space is really cool, and is a fresh take on plugin interfaces.
It’s extremely easy to navigate and kinda looks like it’s a plugin that’s come straight out of a gory, graphic novel.
The interface also comes with a browser that has a load of presets you can choose from to start off with, including custom preset patches from over 50, well known artists.
Verdict
Lo-Fi Space is a stellar, free, vintage effects unit from Waves that is phenomenal for creating distorted reverbs and delays. Use it for sound design, and re-sample to create something entirely new, or just slap it on slightly for a little Lofi character!
- Internally saturated echo that sounds gritty & full of charm.
- Two reverb styles to choose from, Spring and plate.
- Filters included for echo & reverb sculpting.
- 50+ professional artist-created presets
- (for us) The echo is a little too distorted/saturated.
Lo-Fi Space is a fantastic FX unit, that can be used to create some wonderful, gritty, twisted and wonky delays/ambience.
Use it for sound design, or just as a subtle effect, and you’re sure to get some awesome results with it + it’s 100% free, so if you don’t like it – no dramas, just remove it from your computer.
Alternatively, for a detailed breakdown of Flaw’s features and sound, check out our full Tritik Flaw review.
