RELIC guide

Four characters on one AGE macro, the room around them, and one design rule: at AGE 0 the plugin sounds like bypass.

What RELIC is

RELIC is Nolvra's free character plugin: tape, vinyl, VHS and radio in one box, driven by a single AGE macro. Around the four machines sits a room you can turn up: noise with its own tone, a high cut, a reverb chamber, rain, thunder and a tape stop. It runs as AU or VST3 on macOS and VST3 on Windows, and it is free with a Nolvra account, with no time limit and no feature locks.

The RELIC window: the living shader field fills it edge to edge and the console plate floats on top, carrying the four machine slots, the AGE, NOISE and TONE row, the HIGH CUT, REVERB and MIX row, the preset strip along the bottom, and, in its own pocket on the right, the STOP pad with its three lengths, the RAIN knob and the THUNDER switch.

The controls

CHARACTERTAPE · VINYL · VHS · RADIO
AGE0 to 100, default 0
NOISE0 to 100, default 0
TONE0 to 100, default 0
HIGH CUT500 Hz to 20 kHz, default 20 kHz, which is off
REVERB0 to 100, default 0
MIX0 to 100, default 100
RAIN0 to 100, default 0
THUNDEROn or off, default off
STOPHeld, three lengths

RELIC's console plate: the four machine slots with VINYL selected, the CHARACTER group with AGE and NOISE at 55 and TONE at 0, the OUTPUT group with HIGH CUT off, REVERB at 0 and MIX at 100%, the preset well underneath, and the GESTURE pocket carrying the STOP pad, its S, M and L lengths, the RAIN knob at 0 and the THUNDER switch.

AGE

AGE is a macro. Behind it, six parameters move per character, each on its own curve, so AGE 40 on TAPE and AGE 40 on RADIO are genuinely different processes, not the same one at the same depth.

AGE 0 sounds like bypass. That is a design rule, not an accident: every amount curve starts at zero and the engine fades the character in near the bottom of the range, so you can leave RELIC inserted on a chain and it costs you nothing until you turn it up.

RELIC's AGE knob, the hero of the plate, reading 55 inside its own body.

MIX

Straight wet/dry, defaulting to fully wet. At 0 what leaves the plugin is your dry signal. Because AGE already scales the effect, MIX is mostly there for parallel character: heavy AGE at low MIX gives you grit riding under a clean signal, which is a different sound from moderate AGE fully wet.

RELIC's MIX knob, its value box reading 100%.

The four characters

TAPE

Saturation, high-end loss and gentle wow as AGE climbs. The default and the most transparent at low settings: this is the one to reach for when you want glue rather than an effect.

VINYL

A low-pass with a mid lift, plus crackle, pops and dust. The noise floor is part of the character, so this is the one that reads as "old record" rather than "warm".

VHS

Adds modulation on top of the degradation: a chorus-like wobble from the transport rather than the medium. This is the character for drifting, unstable-sounding pads and vocals.

RADIO

Bandwidth restriction plus static: as AGE climbs, the passband closes in from both ends. The bottom edge walks up from around 150 Hz toward 480 Hz and the top edge falls from around 9 kHz to 3 kHz. Use it for transitions, distant vocal effects and anything that should sound like it is coming through a speaker rather than at you.

NOISE, TONE and HIGH CUT

NOISE gives each character its own surface: tape hiss, vinyl surface and crackle, VHS hiss over the mains hum, radio static. It sits outside HIGH CUT on purpose, so darkening the tone never kills the air.

TONE narrows the band of that surface, per character, and at 0 the stage is not in the signal path at all. HIGH CUT is the plugin's own low-pass, from 500 Hz up to 20 kHz, and 20 kHz is the off position.

REVERB

One knob and one chamber, and the chamber is ours: a dark space with a long, heavily damped tail. The impulse response is synthesised at your session's sample rate rather than loaded from a file, so nothing is resampled and the same chamber comes out at 44.1 kHz and at 96 kHz. At zero it is out of the path.

Rain, thunder and stop

RAIN layers a real rain recording, a seamless field loop rather than synthesis. THUNDER rolls real thunder at random intervals and follows the RAIN level, so it stays silent while RAIN is down. STOP is a tape-stop pad on the wet path with three lengths, S, M and L, and it is held rather than clicked.

RELIC's gesture column: the STOP pad with its S, M and L lengths, the RAIN knob reading 75 and the THUNDER switch on.

Presets

Eight factory presets sit in the strip along the bottom. Four are the characters at their sweet spots, TAPE, VINYL, VHS and RADIO, and four take the same characters further down the range: DUST TAPE, 78 RPM, LATE DUB and NIGHT RADIO. The arrows step through them, every load returns the plugin to its defaults before writing the preset's own values, and the presets you save yourself sit in the same strip.

RELIC's preset well with the VINYL preset loaded.

Where to put it

On a bus rather than the master, most of the time. RELIC's characters are strongest as a decision about one element, the drums, the vocal or the sample, and a whole-mix pass at high AGE tends to cost you low end you wanted to keep.

For transitions, automate AGE rather than MIX. AGE moving from 0 to 60 across two bars is a build; MIX moving does the same thing more crudely because the dry signal fights the wet one on the way.

Signing in

RELIC is free but it does need a Nolvra account. Sign in to the Nolvra Hub, on macOS or on Windows, and RELIC unlocks in the same session. You do not need to close and reopen your DAW. If you are signed out, RELIC shows a sign-in overlay rather than failing quietly.

The Hub does not need to stay running afterwards.

Still stuck?

Nothing here matching? Write to a person.

support@nolvra.com