Gloop – work in progress

I thought I’d share how I’m getting on with Gloop, my experimental eurorack performance looper. This version is built using the Electrosmith Daisy Seed. It allows you to record loops (with overdub), and playback with 4 simultaneous play heads. Each play head can be at a different part of the loop, playing at a different speed/pitch, direction and volume. Each play head can also be playing a different area, or sub-loop of the main loop. This can allow you to trim the loop size, play different sections of the main loop with the different play heads or create granular style effects. There is a jitter parameter which controls how much the start of the loop randomly shifts each time the loop restarts.

It’s essentially the culmination of many of my digital projects, combining what I learnt from making the AudioFreeze, GlitchDelay and my other Looper. Gloop has one big advantage over my other looper, (apart from having a screen) which is that the Daisy has a whopping 64MB of RAM, so I can record the loop directly into RAM, rather than having to worry about recording to SD card, and all of the buffering issues this presents. This allows me to go much further with the firmware, supporting multiple sophisticated play heads, which wouldn’t have been possible with the original version.

I designed this to be played live, and I’ve used it as most, this year, at vary iterations and states of completion.

I still want to spend some more time with the firmware, and have started working on some CV and trigger expander modules that connect via I2C. Also the ability to connect a pedal to start and stop the loop, rather than having to press the button. More about those soon. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually try and make Gloop available for sale at some point.

An early prototype testing the OLED screen