Granular synthesis fans may have found a new best friend in the Motion Loop by Free the Tone.
This bright green fella samples a brief section of your performance and loops and manipulates it in real-time, then adding effects like pitch shift, delay, reverse, and filter, among others. It can also randomize the order of sections of the sample to create accidental glitchy parts.
The Looper
The Loop can be retriggered by footswitch or, automatically, by (detected) attack, which means that every new string plucked (within a few seconds) will stop the old loop and record a new one – which works well for phrases with a big space in between them. In this scenario, Manual mode will work pretty much like a delay, where the length of the loop coincides with the rate. But if the “Random” function is selected, the repeats will skip randomly from different sections of the loop, creating unexpected textures.
The Loop’s length can be shortened or lengthened manually through the readily accessible Rate knob, while a Level function lets you set the speed of the loop’s fading out (negative settings). At zero, the loop will keep playing at the same volume, while at positive settings it will gradually increase in volume.
However all the knobs can be reassigned to control any parameter, and the Expression pedal is also freely configurable.
Pitch Shifter: This is a central effect in this pedal: it shifts the sample up to two octaves up or down (FYI, the speed of it changes too, so no time stretching here), and there’s also a portamento function that creates a glissando effect.
Other Effects
The Free the Tone Motion Loop can then apply these effects to the looped sample:
Delay (with Subdivisions), Filter (Hi-pass and Lo-pass), Reverse (loop plays in reverse) and Envelop (which basically affects the loop’s attack).
The following video by Ambient Endeavors does a great job in showcasing the Free the Tone Motion Loop creative potential. We added it to our article about the Best Granular and Glitch Pedals.
The Free The Tone MOTION LOOP is a revolutionary short looper that performs short-term sampling and real-time effect processing such as pitch shift, delay, filter. Its real-time processing enables this short looper to be used as a tool handled like a musical instrument. Random processing of sampled waveforms can create accidental sounds. Enjoy the world of MOTION LOOP that has unlimited potential.
Main Effects Implemented in MOTION LOOP
– Pitch shift (up or down to 2 octaves, speed of pitch shift is also
– Delay (high quality sound with subdivision function)
– Filter (high-pass/low-pass)
– Fade curve effect (adjusts attack of sound)
– Reverse
– Soft clipping
– Loop level (volume increase/decrease setting for each repeat of loops)
– Slowdown (pitch change speed is slowed down along with lowering of pitch)
– Random (divides waveform randomly and rejoins the split pieces)FEATURES
– High-speed real-time effect processing by dedicated DSP.
– The combination of 32-bit fixed point high-speed arithmetic processing and 32-bit floating point high precision arithmetic processing satisfies both sound quality and processing speed, and enables the best performance.
– A unique waveform smoothing process prevents noise due to discontinuities in spliced waveforms.
– A powerful re-triggering function is implemented with sensitivity adjustment per preset. Considering use combined with various effects units, its degree of freedom in playing has been enhanced.
– Functions for knobs and expression pedal are freely assignable. This is configurable in each preset.
– By setting proper BPM, the MOTION LOOP can easily be manipulated while synchronizing with the beat of performance.
