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@maru shared this effect so you can build on it and use it in your DAW.

AvailableEffect

Ping-Pong Delay

Cross-coupled delay with alternating repeats.

About

A stereo delay whose repeats bounce from side to side. A single hit leaves on the left, comes back on the right, and keeps alternating as it fades.

The idea

Two delay lines are wired into each other's inputs. Your signal is summed to mono and enters on the left, so the first repeat is one-sided, and every repeat after that crosses to the other side. The bounce comes from the wiring rather than from anything scheduled, so it stays even at any delay time. Your dry signal keeps its own stereo image.

Controls

  • Time is the gap between one repeat and the next, from 1 ms to one second. Because each repeat changes side, a full left-to-left cycle takes twice this long.
  • Feedback is how much of each repeat crosses to the other side, up to 95%. It applies at every crossing, so each repeat is that much quieter than the one before it, whichever side it lands on.
  • Mix balances the repeats against your dry signal.

The panel's echo ledger shows when each repeat arrives, on which side and how loud, as a model of the settings rather than a measurement.

Getting started

Ping-Pong Delay works best on sounds with space after them: play one guitar note or a short vocal phrase and let it go, and count the repeats side to side. Try Classic Throw for interleaved quarter notes, Dotted Bounce for repeats that pull against the beat, Sixteenth Scatter for a busy spread, Stereo Comb for a short widening effect rather than an echo, and Endless for a long wash.

There is no tempo sync or tap tempo: set Time by ear or by the millisecond.

How it works.

Two delay lines are cross-coupled: the left one's output feeds both the left output channel and the right line's input, and the right one's does the mirror image. A single impulse therefore emerges on the left after one delay time, on the right after two, on the left after three, and so on. Nothing counts repeats or schedules sides, the alternation is a property of the loop, which is why it stays correct at any delay time and needs no re-scheduling when the time knob moves.

The input is summed to mono before it enters the loop, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation. If a stereo source kept its channels, both lines would be seeded at once and the first repeat would arrive on both sides simultaneously, which is precisely the bounce not happening. The dry path keeps the source's own image; only the repeats are mono-seeded.

Feedback is applied at each crossing, so it multiplies twice per full cycle back to the starting side. That is the practical difference from a plain delay's feedback knob: the same number gives a shorter tail here, and the cap the two effects share is measured against the per-crossing gain, which makes it conservative for the round trip rather than marginal.

This is the browser preview: two DelayNodes, two gains and a channel merger, structured after the reference ping-pong delay rather than compiled from the same kernel, and making no parity claim against it. There is no tempo sync and no filtering in the feedback path, so the repeats stay as bright as the source instead of darkening the way an analogue-voiced delay would.

What would you make with Ping-Pong Delay?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Goes well with.

Building block

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