Loopamajig captures snippets of audio and swirls them around in a modulated whirlwind. The recording itself is probabilistically determined and the tempo of the recording windows can be semi-randomized; once audio is captured by one of the four loopers — each with its own pitch and playback direction control — the start and end points of the loops are modulated by triangle wave LFOs, then pass through sine-modulated bandpass filters, before producing a swirling stereo field, courtesy of sine-modulated panners. Things can get pretty trippy. Shifting and skipping loop buffers bounce around, phasing in and out in a sea of filters. There’s also a reverb, because why not.

Honestly, Loopamajig was a patch I started at… some point and sort of forgot about. Then, I discovered it a few days ago, thinking it was probably some half-finished sketch, but instead it was at least a three-quarters-finished patch, so I decided to finish it. I’m mostly including this part because sometimes patches benefit from a little time away. I’m glad I came back — this is a pretty fun effect.

The dry path is stereo. The wet path is summed to mono before a stereo image is created.

Controls:

Stompswitches:

Left — tap tempo (tempo can also be tapped in via a pushbutton on the front page, or it can be set by a value also on the front page)

Middle — hold buffers (holds the current contents of the loop buffers in place; currently recording buffers will finish their recording period but not begin recording again; this is also available via a UI button on the front page); the patch also accepts MIDI clock

Control page:

In each corner are controls for the pitch and playback direction of each looper. Also, when that loop is recording, a pixel will turn red.

Record chance — this sets the probability of one of the loopers recording during its recording window; at 1.000 there is a 50/50 chance it records, all values below this favor playback over recording. Because recording is based on probability, the loopers might record for two cycles in a row (or three, etc. with decreasing likelihood) and likewise might play back for multiple cycles in a row

Window flux — this randomizes the recording window. The greater the window flux amount, the shorter the loop window has the potential to be

Record rate — as mentioned in the stompswitch section, this introduces the option to set the base recording tempo via a rate control, rather than tap tempo

Pos(ition) mod rate — this controls the rate of the LFOs which modulate the start and end positions. All of the LFOs in the patch have individual rates, to encourage organic outcomes, but this controls the general rate of the LFOs assigned to this modulation

Feedback — this controls the amount that the outputs of all loopers are fed into the inputs of all loopers; since recording window may vary, this can produce some unexpected results

Hold buffers (button) — see stompswitch section

Q — sets the resonance of the bandpass filters; this control is unbounded and at high amounts can introduce a lot of gain (potentially compensated for by the wet level control)

Low bandpass filter (BPF) frequency — sets the minimum frequency of the filter sweeps

High BPF frequency — sets the maximum frequency of the filter sweeps

Filter sweep rate — controls the general rate of the filter sweep LFOs

Pan spread — sets the width of the panning modulation

Pan spread rate — controls the general rate of the panning LFOs

Reverb decay — sets the decay of the reverb lite

Reverb mix — sets the mix of the reverb lite

Dry and wet level — used to set the mix for the patch