I have had quite a fascination with the Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water pedal for a very long time. It has kind of become known as That Tape Effect Pedal, introducing warble and pitch modulation through vibrato and chorus effects, in a similar way that a cassette tape or a tape machine might. A brand new Shallow Water pedal will come in around $299, and you can most likely find a few of them on the second hand market of your choice.
Or, if you have Ableton, you could recreate it for free.
YouTuber Griffin Jennings put together a fantastic tutorial on how to achieve that Shallow Water sound using Abelton’s Effects Rack feature and a few easy-to-replicate settings in some plugins. There are a couple paid plugins involved in this video, but with enough tweaking and experimentation you should be able to accomplish this same thing using stock plugins. Griffin even tells you which stock plugins to use as a replacement in the description of the video should you not have those paid plugins in your toolkit.
Effects Rack is unique to Ableton, and it doesn’t seem like there are any universal plugins that could offer the same features for Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, or whatever DAW you may be using. Effects Rack allows you to assign parameters within other plugins to knobs on one central user interface, meaning you can manipulate those parameters without having to open the plugin. If you wanted to, you could assign multiple parameters from multiple plugins to a single knob, so you could control a few different things at once.
Something like that might not sound super useful, until you realize that a lot of the time the knobs or sliders on your favorite pedals or synthesizers aren’t always operating only one function. They quite often do many things at once, as is the case with Shallow Water, so using the Effects Rack in Ableton will help to simulate that.
On paper, Shallow Water might sound like a very specific effect with a limited use case. If you’re not the type of person who finds that warbly, tape-like effect desirable, there would probably be better options for a vibrato or chorus pedal. Or you might even skip this entirely. However, if you are one of those musicians who enjoys the rabbit hole of tape emulation in non-tape presentations, Shallow Water is one of the best out there.
One of the things that makes the Shallow Water so special is that it features a unique low pass gate effect that responds to the dynamics of your playing. The filter gate opens and closes depending on how hard or soft you play your instrument, and the depth of this effect can be controlled by one of the knobs on the face of the pedal. This type of thing isn’t present on a lot of other pedals, and its one probably the biggest
This video from the legendary Knobs details many of the functions of Shallow Water and how they interact with each other. It’s an excellent starting point for learning the pedal.
And this video from The Pedal Zone demonstrates several ways the Shallow Water can be used in a few more musical and compositional contexts, not as just a straight pedal functionality demo. As one YouTube commenter states, “Knobs sent me up and you dunked me. I need this pedal.” In his final words in the review of the pedal, The Pedal Zone states that the Shallow Water is "hands down the most emotional experience (playing a pedal) I've ever had."
If you aren’t able to grab the physical pedal, which I highly recommend doing to support that company, then this Ableton trick will get you pretty close to that final result. Even if you don’t have Ableton, you should be able to find similar effects in your DAW of choice, you just might not be able to adjust the parameters as easily and it will take a little bit more dialing in. Make your life easy and save those channel strip settings.
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