Working With Old Jokes For Old Folks: What You Actually Need to Know
Old Jokes For Old Folks is a vintage-style wavetable oscillator plugin made by Audio Damage. It's designed to emulate the behavior of analog oscillators with a bit of digital flexibility layered on top. You get six waveforms, detune control, sub-oscillator options, and a drive knob that adds harmonic content. That's the basic feature set. I ran into a specific issue not too long ago where the plugin would randomly drift out of tune after being used alongside certain other oscillators in a live set. The problem wasn't the plugin itself—it was my sample rate mismatch. I had the project set to 44.1kHz but my audio interface was running at 48kHz, and the resampling was causing subtle pitch artifacts that accumulated over time. My workaround was straightforward: I set my DAW to 48kHz across the board and disabled the sample rate conversion in the interface settings. The tuning stayed stable after that.
Download and Installation for Old Jokes For Old Folks
You can grab it from the Audio Damage website or from major retailers like Splice and Plugin Boutique. The standard versions are VST3, AU, and AAX. If you're on macOS, make sure you're running macOS 11 or later. Windows users need at least Windows 10. The installer is about 85MB uncompressed. It installs to your normal plugin folders—nothing unusual there. During installation, it does create a license file in your Documents folder, so don't delete that if you want to stay activated. The registration process uses a serial number tied to your machine. One thing people miss: if you're running a virtual machine or a containerized DAW setup, the license check can fail because it sees the hardware ID as changing. I've seen this happen with Docker-based plugin hosts. The fix is to keep a single persistent hardware ID or use the iLok cloud licensing option instead of local storage.
How It Actually Sounds
Most people expect something warm and analog because of the marketing. The truth is it sits somewhere between a subtractive synth oscillator and a wavetable engine. The six waves—saw, square, triangle, sine, pulse, and noise—sound decent but they aren't going to replace a dedicated analog model. What it does well is the detune and sub features. The detune range goes from -24 semitones to +24, and the sub has three modes: sine, square, and triangle at one octave below, two octaves below, or a mix. That sub layer is where you'll get the most use out of this plugin in a mix. The drive section is simple. It's not a full distortion circuit—it's a soft clip with a bit of saturation. Turn it past about 60% and you start getting audible digital artifacts. Keep it under 50% for clean-ish warmth, past 50% and you're just adding fizz. This matters less if you're using it as a bass source since the sub knob handles most of the low end anyway. There's a filter section too, but it's basic. A single-pole lowpass at 12dB per octave. That's it. No resonance, no keyboard tracking adjustments. It does the job for simple sweeping but don't expect it to do heavy melodic work. I usually route this through a separate filter plugin rather than using the built-in one.
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Common Pitfalls
The first thing that catches people off guard is the CPU usage relative to what it does. It's not heavy, but it's not lightweight either. In a project with twenty instances running simultaneously, you'll notice a small but measurable increase in CPU. Not dramatic, but noticeable if you're already near your threshold. I've run it with eight copies in a single session without issues, but twelve or more starts to show up in the meter. Another thing: the oscillators don't sync with each other. If you're coming from a hardware synth background where oscillator sync is a thing, this won't have that feature. You can achieve similar results by routing the output of one oscillator into the input of another's modulation section, but it's not the same behavior. This limitation matters most if you're trying to recreate classic acid bass sounds or ring-modulation textures. For those, you'd be better off with something like Serum or Vital. The mute and solo states don't always follow your DAW's expectations when you automate the gain. I hit this when automating volume swells over a long arrangement. The plugin would sometimes ignore the automation curve and snap back to unity gain at certain points. The workaround was to use your DAW's track fader instead of the plugin's gain knob for automation. It's a known quirk and Audio Damage hasn't patched it yet.
Who Should Use This
Old Jokes For Old Folks fits best as a secondary oscillator source. It's not going to be your main bass synth or lead. Think of it as a flavor add-on—something to run parallel to your primary oscillator to thicken the sound or add harmonic movement. The detune and sub controls do that effectively. If you need a full-spectrum synth, look elsewhere. If you want a reliable, straightforward oscillator that sounds close enough to analog for most situations without breaking the bank, it does the job. The price is usually around $49, which is reasonable for what you get. It's not free, but it's not in the expensive tier either. For someone building out a library of go-to synths, it's worth having one or two instances for specific tasks. Not essential, but useful when you need it.
