The Magician
mono/stereo → mono/stereo
Select a grid button or a stompswitch
Capture a sound, work magic on it, and play over what comes back
A fine-tuned micro-looper with a granular engine, a delay and a reverb. Loop anything and it comes back changed, barely or beyond recognition, while you keep playing over the top. Inspired by the Chase Bliss Mood MKII.
By Plume
Press the to record. turns red . Press it again and the loop starts playing. The indicator turns sky blue . Let it run 16 seconds and it stops on its own. A third press overdubs and the indicator turns pink . Press again to go back to playback.
Once the loop is playing, sets how much of it goes to the granular. The changes its speed, and its pitch with it, while keeping things in tune. If you prefer flexibility the knob sweeps any speed freely, from below half up to double. It stops nowhere in particular, so the loop will sit out of tune with what you play unless you land an interval by ear.
The clock can be changed while the loop plays. Nothing stops and nothing has to
be recorded again.
Each of the last three rows sets the parameters for one group, looper, granular or FX, and triggers that group's actions.
Press to stop the loop, or long press to clear it. Press to turn off the FX, long press to turn off loop FX.
The looper was designed with a lot of care: no latency, a clean overdub bypass, and no parasites or ghost sounds.
The third row holds the looper's parameters and actions.
| the loop into the delay and reverb, or straight out | |
| loop volume | |
| where in the recording playback begins | |
| how much of it plays. Short is a stutter | |
| playback speed, and pitch with it | |
| low cut on what the granular is fed, off to 880 Hz | |
| how much loop reaches the delay and reverb | |
| plays backwards, latched |
sweeps freely, from below half speed up to double. Centred is the recorded speed.
The writes the same setting in fixed steps. Both stop at ×2, and the menu reaches an octave lower:
| Slow | Normal and fast |
|---|---|
| two octaves down | unison |
| one octave down | a fourth up |
| a fifth down | a fifth up |
| a fourth down | one octave up |
The row is dark until the menu is opened. Unison is the white cap in the middle. Knob and menu write the same value, and whichever moved last wins.
Record a line, drop to ×1/2, play over it, come back to ×1: the overdub is an
octave up.
| on or off | |
| loop against grains. Hard left the loop alone, hard right the grains alone | |
| where in the loop the grains are read | |
| two octaves either way, loop speed unchanged | |
| grain size | |
| grain envelope, soft to hard | |
| how many overlap | |
| holds the buffer while the loop runs on, latched |
The live signal and the loop share one bus. The delay and the reverb each have their own mix.
| the bus on or off | |
| · · | delay parameters |
| · | reverb parameters |
| how much of what you play reaches the bus |
and are on the page.
With the bus off, or the loop FX off, the loop goes straight to the output at full.
| Granular | Delay and reverb | |
|---|---|---|
| What you play live | never | , when |
| The loop | , when | , when and on |
also picks what the looper records: dry when it is on, the mix as you hear it when it is off.
One cable in is enough. The pedal copies it to both sides.
The looper is mono, and deliberately so: a second one would mean a second resampler running whenever the clock is off unity, which is where the CPU goes.
The granular is stereo, so blending toward the grains widens the loop; hard left it stays mono. The delay and the reverb are stereo.
What you hear live never passes through the looper, so it stays stereo end to end and is never resampled. The looper is still listening to it — that is what gets recorded.
Page holds one trigger per footswitch gesture on top and destinations at the bottom. Move a wire and the footswitch changes. has no gesture wired to it, so you could put it in place of .