Manufacturer : Rhythmic Robot / Format : NCW, NKI, NKR
Quality : 24 bit Frequency: 44.1 kHz Channels: mono
System requirements : Native Instruments – Kontakt 4.2.4 +
Loopscape was inspired by the experiments of musical pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Brian Eno. Eno created music by combining looped pieces of magnetic tape of varying lengths, which produced non-repeating, constantly changing sound textures. Loopscape implements this concept in the form of a synthesizer.
Loopscape offers the user three virtual loops that can be played simultaneously. Each of them can be loaded with one of six classic analog waveforms (Saw, Double Saw, Triangle, Square, Sine, Noise) and set the duration from 0.5 to 17 seconds (with irregular intervals). Each loop is equipped with a resonant filter (HP / LP) with LFO, and three additional modulation generators that control the amplitude and pitch. The LFO has five waveforms (Sine, Triangle, Sawtooth, Square, Random). There is an ADSR envelope generator. Thanks to all these features, even playing the same note for a thousand years, you will never get a repeating sound.
Inspired by the experimental soundscapes produced by 70s pioneers like Brian Eno, Loopscape is a synthesiser that creates endlessly modulating, evolving complexities of sound from raw waveforms recorded onto looped sections of audio tape. It is richly warm, thoroughly analogue, and every sonic inch of it has been printed to oxide and passed across the playback heads of vintage tape gear of the past. This is the sound of science meeting art: the depth of analogue synthesis run through real tape spools. And look – it’s covered in knobs and sliders, too!
Loopscape starts with a simple idea, one that found traction with the music concrete brigade of the 60s and 70s. Back then, Brian Eno composed “Music for Airports”, a sound installation piece which employed tape loops of different lengths running simultaneously. Although the individual loops cycled round predictably, the combination of sound produced by multiple loops of different lengths running all at once created an “incommensurable” sound that was, to all practical purposes, unlikely ever to repeat. Instead it just continued to evolve, forever, into infinity. Isn’t that just cool?
Loopscape takes that concept and turns it into a synthesiser. We started with loops of tape. Lots of loops of tape. The basic sound-creation panes of Loopscape allow you to select any one of six basic synthesiser waveforms: two Sawtooth waves, Triangle, Square, Sine and Noise. All of these started life as true analogue waveforms from a variety of synthesisers, except for Noise, which we took from atmospheric static.
The raw waves were then recorded onto several old tape machines running at a variety of speeds. Now, for this instrument to make sense, the last thing we needed was clean tape machines. We wanted every mechanical problem under the sun, simply because we wanted our tape loops to show a lot of natural variation in their sound. We invited wow, flutter, wobble, hiss, head bump and print-through into our homes, sat them down and poured them a drink. We made friends with them. Who needs Studer mastering machines at 30ips when you can have cranky old 60s valve sets from the attic instead? The outputs of these vintage tape recorders were then recorded back into the digital domain at 24-bit quality to preserve every wonky detail of their erratic goodness.
Each basic waveform is therefore available within Loopscape at 8 different loop lengths: half a second, two thirds of a second, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 17 seconds. (Why those particular numbers? Because they’re primes, and we believe they have a special mojo all of their own.) We wanted you to be able to hear those loops, so we deliberately chose sections of tape that failed to loop smoothly, and we did very little to disguise their splice points. If you select a half-second loop, you’re going to hear that thing looping round every half a second like a heartbeat.
