Audio Damage ENSO (Looper)

[robbmonn]

Best way to try out SoS looping? If you use Ableton:

1. make a return track. Put a bunch of delays on it... for like 10-20 seconds of total delay time. Turn the feedback down to 0% on all of them and the wet/dry to 100% wet.
2. right click on the send knob on the return track to allow it to send to itself. Turn this up to 80% or so.
3. Send audio to that send. It will go into the delays and feed back into itself, creating a looper.
4. Putting stuff in the feedback loop is AMAZING. Minding that feedback level and with a finger on the mute for the return track start playing around with (light) saturation effects, tape wobble effects and the like, or with turning up some of the feedbacks on the inline delays just a little, etc to get more echoes and chorusing.
4b. It is very much about carefully adjusting all the gain stages in the loop, you want to keep it from going out of control... I allow mine to slowly decay to silence (but you can do this so that it takes 30 min to get there!)
4c. Anything that has a limiting function (saturation, etc) will help you to emphasize what you are playing live over the loop... especially if your feedback is less than 100%. But in any case it makes a nice glue for all the sounds.
5. You are frippertronicing now, but in the digital age.
6. Make one or more additional loop return tracks of different lengths of delay or with other changes. Carefully set them to send back and forth to each other, creating a feedback network.
7. When you get something good going save your session. Then you can go right back in and not have to rebuild and gain stage everything.

profit. This is my workflow (I use Augustus instead of delays because I want a long loop and to be able to tap the duration of it) and it is an extension of what I used to do with reel to reel decks 25 years ago. You can make some amazing sounds this way. I actually bounce my signal out to a 3-head tape deck inline with the feedback and back in. Works like a charm and sounds fantastic. Every repetition of the loop is degraded by and additional tape generation. Ghz Wow control or Softube Tape are also very good for this and can be set up so that they produce a controlled amount of noise (or none) which is a plus.

[deastman]

robbmonn- Yes, doubling or halving the buffer size while in the middle of recording might cause glitches. You might want to switch out of record mode while performing that function. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a very useful function to have, accepting certain constraints on its use. Also, I think you’re overstating the difficulty of adding such a feature, even if you did want to pull it off live in the manner you described. It takes a few duplicate buffers, a few interpolaters, and some judicious crossfading, but we aren’t talking about rocket science here. Perhaps if your frame of reference is building your own in MaxMSP, it might not be the easiest thing in the world, but it isn’t nearly as difficult in C++.

[someone called simon]

I don’t require complex layering, but a single undo buffer doesn’t seem like too much to ask for. Also the ability to double the length of a loop buffer, making two copies of the existing content, or halving the buffer and throwing out half of the existing content. The reason being that you might want to start with a one measure loop, then overdub a four measurepart on top of that, and then a sixteen measure part on top of that. You would want the shorter bits to keep repeating, while giving you a larger buffer for the longer overdubs.

In the comments on the longer youtube clip someone asks this, the reply indicates they might do it.

[robbmonn]

OK, so that's funny. You're the only person that I've seen say that something related to DSP isn't nearly as difficult in C++. (/me bows down to the master) If that's the case you should go code up some loopers for VCV or Eurorack... there are many but none of them work very well. That said the issue of this being a plugin focused on destructive processing of feedback (arguably, it's core feature) makes that feature janky as opposed to integrated, and I intuit that this is why it doesn't feature that.

There is a demo posted on the website: https://www.audiodamage.com/products/ad049-enso

[vurt]

.
4b. It is very much about carefully adjusting all the gain stages in the loop, you want to keep it from going out of control...

no i dont.
i want it to go out of control, then tame it like a wild dragon!
my audience aghast and amazed by my mastery of noise!

little do they know, im just switching down the feedback, nowt fancy, but it looks and sounds good

[experimental.crow]

i've been having a lot of fun w/ the demo ...
given that it's an AD plugin , you better love it for what it is right now...

i sort of do ...

[paradiddle]

My main issue was with the main loop clicking between the start and end point sometimes but just shortening the lenght of the loop by a notch or 2 fixes that. Anyway excellent looper for my audiomulch experiments!

[someone called simon]

I'm having a play round with this. I'm surprised the sectors can't be quantised to the same settings as the initial loop. That makes it pretty much impossible to play rhythmic stuff against a drum pattern. Unless I'm missing something.

I'm used to more structured approaches so I'd like an option for the loop to be defined in measures as well as degrees. So you could have the sectors be musical divisions rather than have to convert bars to degrees. It's still pretty cool but, not quite what I imagined. I thought you'd be able to record the sectors individually too, rather than them be divisions of 1 loop.

[rbx11]

RE: The clicks.

Couldn't you in theory apply a fade in and fade out for every time you record or overdub?

I just messed around with the demo without reading any of the manual, and while I did not fully wrap my head around all that was going on, seems to me a simple set of sliders to control a theoretical fade in and fade out would do the trick in terms of getting rid of any clicks.

Could set it up so that the fades were applied every time you hit one of ENSO's transport buttons (fade in for record and overdub, and fade out for play and stop).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Just thinking out loud here.

[deastman]

OK, so that's funny. You're the only person that I've seen say that something related to DSP isn't nearly as difficult in C++. (/me bows down to the master) If that's the case you should go code up some loopers for VCV or Eurorack... there are many but none of them work very well. That said the issue of this being a plugin focused on destructive processing of feedback (arguably, it's core feature) makes that feature janky as opposed to integrated, and I intuit that this is why it doesn't feature that.

There is a demo posted on the website: https://www.audiodamage.com/products/ad049-enso

Well, I have years of experience with Max as well as programming in many different languages. That said, I have zero interest in spending my limited free time coding loopers. I’d rather buy one from Audio Damage. But with regards to my previous comments, I was thinking specifically about the ease of instantiating an arbitrary number of arbitrary objects, as opposed to the graphical programming language way of doing things.

[zerocrossing]

Here’s my quick take on it after a few days...

My first thought is that it’s a little light on features. I get that it must have been monumental to be able to do the speed change stuff, but it should, at the very least, be able to do multiple loops that can be switched via a quantize amount. The “sector” thing is interesting, but not nearly as useful as plain old separate loops.

I’m surprised that the MIDI learn doesn’t allow you to control feedback amount or speed with CC. What? That seems like a huge oversight, and really limits its usefulness.

I’ve also come across a bug where you can set a MIDI CC to control “Switch” but after it’s set,it doesn’t respond.

So, I’m glad it exits and I’m happy to have purchased it, but it won’t get the same kind of use that Möbius gets. It’s a nice specialty looper, but it’ll need a lot of development to become a broadly used tool in my studio. I wish Circular Lab would just make Möbius’ code open source so someone could continue development.

[zerocrossing]

I'm having a play round with this. I'm surprised the sectors can't be quantised to the same settings as the initial loop. That makes it pretty much impossible to play rhythmic stuff against a drum pattern. Unless I'm missing something.

I'm used to more structured approaches so I'd like an option for the loop to be defined in measures as well as degrees. So you could have the sectors be musical divisions rather than have to convert bars to degrees. It's still pretty cool but, not quite what I imagined. I thought you'd be able to record the sectors individually too, rather than them be divisions of 1 loop.

Agreed. I like that they’ve come up with a new type of thing, but I feel it should have been in addition to what you’re talking about, not instead of. Maybe they felt that there’s already a free tool that does that, so why bother.

[foosnark]

It finally occurred to me today that I might not have to suffer with no looper in Eurorack (for now (*)) and no looper pedal if there's something in software...

...looks like I found it


(*) E520 seems to have an excellent looper mode with some lofi options

[Crandnew]

I am loving this plugin. Just trying to figure out resampling. Is it possible to over dub the same loop onto itself with different settings. I am enabling dub in place, turning the input all the way down, and cranking the feedback. But say I want the same loop over dubbed an octave down and in reverse, it seems I need to feed it into a second instance, synchronize them, and feed it into the second instance to overdub. If I just use the aforementioned settings, and change the record settings, it seems to completely cancel out what I have in the loop.

I wish the overdub actually overdubbed instead of working like the record function when only the output is being fed back into the input. Anyone figured out a way around this without a second instance?

[zerocrossing]

Completely crashes Cubase 10 when attempting to do basic looping.

Tried it a multitude of times but it always crashes.

I’m getting that now in Bitwig Studio. It used to work fine, but I had to abandon it for MSuperLooper, even though Enso is better suited for what I was attempting.