Bill Putnam Sr. and Duane H. Cooper’s 1971 garden hose delay now runs in any DAW on macOS and Windows, so you no longer need an Apollo or a UAD Accelerator to use it.
Until now, you could only use Universal Audio’s Cooper Time Cube on an Apollo interface or a UAD Accelerator card, and users had spent years asking for a version that would run on their computer alone. UA has finally done it, releasing the UAD Cooper Time Cube Delay as a native plug-in for macOS and Windows that works in any DAW without UA hardware.
Catch up on all the latest news here.
The original unit dates back to 1971, when UA founder Bill Putnam Sr. and Duane H. Cooper came up with one of the stranger ways anyone has delayed a signal. Instead of tape or circuitry, the Time Cube sent audio through a coiled length of garden hose and picked it up again at the other end. Engineers who wanted slapback with a bit of character took to the short, slightly softened repeats it produced. You can hear it on Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good” and War’s “Low Rider”, and the hardware has had a cult following ever since.
No artist is more closely tied to the Time Cube than Joe Walsh, and his longtime drummer Joe Vitale was in the room when Walsh first came across the unit. On “Life’s Been Good”, Walsh’s 1978 hit, producer and engineer Bill Szymczyk put a stereo Eventide delay on the verse vocal. For the double-tracked choruses he switched to a Time Cube to thicken them further, and that slightly boxy double has been part of the Joe Walsh sound from then on.
The native version keeps the two independent delay lines. Each side can be set to its own time, and both can lock to the session tempo when you want rhythmic repeats rather than a single echo. At short settings, it thickens vocals, guitars and keys into a natural-sounding double. Setting the two lines to different times spreads a part across the stereo field without crowding the centre of the mix. Treble, Bass and Color controls shape the tone of the repeats, and a high-pass filter keeps the echoes from muddying the low end.
If you’re already working in UA’s native range, the Cooper Time Cube Delay is also included in UAD Spark Studio. You can buy it on its own from Universal Audio now, at an introductory price for a limited time.
For more information, head here
