This is giving me more of a picture of the Lubadh… In the first few minutes I’m thinking, “okay…” Then he engages the darn tape looper. Wow.
If it could work as a pedal like looper but then give me this sort of capture/mix live functionality that seems worth it.
It’s a bar shy.
You’d need a bit more that 48 seconds for 16 bars at 80 BPM. That seems like a reasonable lower limit on minimum storage to me. 9 minutes is long enough to capture a fairly long performance. The Instruo unit has a lot to offer from a modular perspective but might be a bit awkward to use like a traditional looper pedal. It’s also pretty pricey compared to most loopers.
I enjoyed the video but it was difficult for me to isolate the looper’s contribution at times. I didn’t have time to watch the whole video as yet so maybe it becomes clearer when he explains the patch.
Well… I just spent the last couple of hours trying to push everything out of what I have. I think that it is an important thing to keep doing in order to stop chasing the dragon’s tail, so to speak. I hit some really eerie sounding loops with a deep kick like it was on a submarine. I got fairly excited because I was able to send a pulse to the Blooper’s EXT input from your master clock with count-in, via the ES-8. The next step would be to go through the mBrane (Yarns) from the Digitakt, then when I get the cable,
Digitakt–> Blooper.
It’s such a strength of the ES-8 and Audulus that one can troubleshoot and create so many tools and interfacing workarounds. Not being able to run the Digitakt and the ES-8 on the iPad is definitely a barrier but mainly because of the USB over MIDI block. I think this should all workout soon. Patience, more patience!
I do like feeding Blooper CV. I don’t know why, but there is something deep in the human psyche about breaking out CV…
Have you tried plugging in the Digitakt then the ES-8? I’m wondering if that would register the ES-8 as the audio interface but leave the digitakt midi link functional? You could also buy one of the cheap midi to usb converter cables and connect the Digitakt 5 pin midi to the iPad that way which removes the Digitakt audio interface from the equation.
Worked! 
Digitakt is sending MIDI triggers to the ES-8 via Audulus.
The Blooper is syncing nicely using the mBrane and I am feeding the modulation effects on it LFO’s from Audulus.
Just that one little hitch broke everything open and I am tracking it all in Ableton. Sounds really good. Really like the Blooper.
Cool! Glad it worked. AFAIK the iPad simply uses the last audio interface connected as the system audio source. I’m not fond of situations that require a certain connection order so I would still consider one of the 5 pin to USB MIDI converter cables. They’re inexpensive and I’ve had one on my Beat Buddy for ages and have never had a problem with it. Amazon has tons of them.
FWIW, steer clear of the iConnectivity Mio interface for MIDI DIN via USB. I have one, and it worked great for ~2 months, and then one day it started firing MIDI notes and triggers completely out of order, with no discernible pattern to the madness. It’s like someone connected the A3 random node to a mult node and ran the notes/gates through that. I couldn’t be more disappointed in my purchase 
The one I bought doesn’t even have a brand name on in, but it still works fine lol. I remember it was a pretty cheap Chinese brand.
I had a chance this morning to watch the whole workshop video. A very creative designer! I think I see what he was trying to achieve with the looper. It’s not really intended to be a traditional looper in eurorack format, rather a tool for manipulating pieces of audio. I’m hoping A4 will provide some similar capabilities. I was also impressed with his chord generator. A very musical way to manage harmony in the context of a modular system. Neat stuff!
You could definitely build a killer system with his modules if you had the budget for it. It’s nice to see some innovative ideas, particularly in the analog realm. I realize that some of his modules are hybrid designs, but he seems to stay analog where it’s practical to do so. I certainly have nothing against digital, but there is a certain appeal to the randomness inherent in analog circuitry.
Here’s the way I see it…
Analog circuitry involves components with chemical properties. These components form a system of logical expressions by way of their arrangement, in terms of the functions they each perform. Mathematically a logical connective (or complex equation) has an absolute value. Conversely, transistors, capacitors and diodes are actual objects.
When electricity is injected into these circuits, a number of possibilities open up. Switches, thresholds, and storage make states. To me, the sonically interesting part is when enough power is in the circuit to reflect the chemical attributes of the parts on the board, so that ‘nano-decisions’ are made. Just in the way that a roiling river may eddy, all natural systems respond to threshold events by making phase transitions to accommodate increasing or decreasing pressures.
This is all still math, but the mathematics are contained (bracketed) and introduced (added) which not only results in boarder contact, but the character of the objects is identifiable by their role in the sub, as well as, total systems.
Even though the relations between circuitboard parts are logical, those connectives have chemical identities which imparts infinite curves. I believe that we, ultimately, hear this math as a kind of warmth.
Digitakt + Blooper! 
I am astonished. The Digitakt sat for months. Eventually I got into it. I actually loaned it to someone for a long time shortly after I bought it and just dove into Audulus with an older iPad Mini 4. Got it back, combined that Audulus simplicity with it. Had a blast. Then I just hemmed and hawed about a looper pedal. I figured I would make do so that I could get back into some stringed instruments. I picked up a Blooper and fed it some gates and CV. Kind of excited but had some sync issues and felt glum. Finally a special MIDI to TRS cable arrived Christmas Eve.
So I am back on the forums, scouring the manuals, watching youtube videos. I get the Blooper to sync to the Digitakt nice and tight. Okay fine, good. I have a looper. But, then I am reading the MIDI chart and oh my I start mapping the parameters to the Digitakt and realize I can basically record synced automation of the modifiers. Then I just got lost in the best way. What a combination.
Because there is audio over USB MIDI between the Digitakt and iPad, you can then bring it all into AUM. Earlier today I was working with Audio Damage’s Enso. AUM is not a DAW, so finding ways to live jam with loops seemed important and I never took the time to crack Enso. Low CPU, fantastic interface. Grab a synth, or whatever and play around until you get something. Enso grabs it. Then you can work with that loop.
Had to share it because it all takes so much work.
But these three boxes: iPad, Digitakt, Blooper. Small, immediate and effective.
Sometimes cracking the code is just getting the interfacing right. Through it all, Audulus was there when I needed to troubleshoot. I suppose the next phase is to integrate the modular…
Happy Holidays! 
Happy Holidays! Glad Santa brought you something exciting. Sometimes it’s the simple things that can make all the difference. Funny how one piece of wire can change things so drastically.
While we’re on the subject of loopers there’s an iPad app that I can recommend. LoopyHD. Clean interface, MIDI sync and control, multiple loops. It’s only IAA, no AUv3 but really well thought out.
One of the benefits and challenges of our somewhat peculiar way of making music is the sheer complexity of it all. It provides endless opportunities for exploration but a very challenging path to tread on the way. I’ve had the Push 2 and Live for quite some time now and still don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to using them to their potential. I’ve watched countless videos and read the manual multiple times but I’ve still only scratched the surface. Add in the hardwire synths and all the various plug-ins and it’s often difficult to know where to even start. Although I sometimes suffer from that all too common malady “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” I would really be much better off I think, learning to really use what I already have.
I think the difference between analog and digital design boils down to chaos vs. order.
The world is fundamentally chaotic. At the most elemental level events occur by chance and we are ruled by probabilities.
By reducing the circuit elements to only two possible states, digital circuitry attempts, as far as humanly possible, to remove that chaotic element. Small variations in component behavior are masked by the huge gulf between “on” and “off”.
The same is true of analog circuit design. A circuit whose behavior is totally unpredictable is not generally useful. However in the case of an analog circuit small variations are often propagated through the circuit and affect the final output despite the designers best intentions. Because these variables change with time and external conditions, the circuit will never behave in exactly the same way. Generating random noise is trivial in the analog domain, but an exceedingly difficult problem for digital circuitry.
Careful engineering can reduce these variations to a manageable level but cannot remove them entirely.
In the musical world we’ve grown accustomed to these imperfections and over time have come to embrace them. A vacuum tube amplifier is really a rather poor amplifier in the engineering sense. High levels of distortion, uneven frequency response, etc. It was simply the best that they could do at the time. The resulting sound however has become something to strive for. As an engineer it sometimes amazes me that we still produce vacuum tubes at all, but the musician in me understands why. I have a very nice little Pevey solid state amp, but I would trade it in a minute for my old Fender Super-Reverb from 50 years ago. Early synthesizers faced the same challenges. It’s not that they wanted to build oscillators that continually drifted, they simply had no choice. The resulting equipment was very expensive, prone to failure and quite temperamental. In the end it was probably a good thing in the long run. My Neutron takes a good 30 minutes to warm up and become more or less stable, but I still love the quirky little thing.
As digital equipment has evolved, we have gotten better and better at emulating this natural variability, and I expect that over time the actual differences between digital and analog hardware will become vanishingly small, but I think there will still be a place for analog hardware if for no other reason than the desire to be different. I’m happy that we have such a wide choice available these days. Personally I’m quite content to embrace a mixture of the two without being overly concerned about the pros and cons of either.
I was reading a comment by Os from Expert Sleepers the other day regarding the audio fidelity of the ES-8/9 vs. a more typical interface. He pointed out that an ES-8 might not be the best choice for recording a singer or an acoustic instrument where we already have a very good idea of how they should sound, but as far as a synth is concerned. who’s to say? This seemed a very perceptive observation to me. All this gear is synthetic and as such, its sound is what it is. Not better of worse, except in a personal subjective sense. You may like a sound or hate it, that’s your choice. Vive la difference!
Can I quarrel with this? It’s something I wanted to initially comment on but I left it out. I will throw humility out the window, since this is not my area…
I see it as a matter of resolution, instead of order vs. disorder. I mean, it is strange to say that, “the world is fundamentally chaotic.” What if we drop this, because I think I get what you are saying, and substitute an ocular metaphor. We could claim that things are blurry, but come into focus. However, I like the idea of Mandelbrot sets, where much is at a distance, rather than out of focus. Making this alteration to a visual trope allows for the idea that levels of detail require particular vantage points.
Moving back toward the topic of novel behaviour in analog circuitry, I want to say that there is nothing chaotic going on there, but definitely unpredictable. This is where I would inject what you were saying about probabilities. But are we ruled by probabilities? I prefer the notion that laws capture habits, rather than causally drive systems. One of the upshots to this approach is that we fallibly hypothesize, without adding extra certainties. I think it makes even more sense when we think about probabilities as outcome wagers that track behaviours.
What’s the difference? Well, I think that the barrier between digital and analog is actually processing power. There is just too much math going on in analog systems, which is why parallel processing is so useful. In nature, I would think, decentralized processing is what makes nature so novel. A zillion urges converging.
There may very well be a single simple equation for the most fundamental components of all other components. However, I have a hunch that the equation itself is meaningless without something to understand it – in the sense that a book the second time through is a different book. So, perhaps this equation is the recipe for ‘knowing’ but when we come to know this knowing, a new responsibility emerges which expresses the concept in total.
This would be a very chaotic process. Not so chaotic as a whole though, since I am hard pressed to entertain the idea that everything in the universe cannot be accounted for.
It’s an interesting consideration. Is the uncertainty we see at the subatomic level truly random, or is it simply that our lack of understanding prevents us from seeing a deeper truth? Physicists have struggled with this since Heisenberg first introduced the concept. So far as we can tell, the behavior of the most fundamental constituents of our universe is truly random. Unlike the Mandelbrot set, where the level of detail continues ad infinitum as you examine it more closely, there seems to be a point beyond which we cannot go. Whether this is the most fundamental level possible has yet to be determined. The two great theoretical paradigms of our age are Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum chromodynamics. Both have led to a much deeper understanding of the world around us and have explained our observations with an amazing level of precision, however they are mutually exclusive. Both cannot be correct, at least in their present form. Clearly we still lack some deeper understanding that has yet to be discovered.
When I speak of chaos with respect to analog circuits, I am referring to the indeterminate behavior of the elementary particles that manifest as the electrical currents we observe. While we can fairly accurately predict the behavior of the particles en masse, we cannot say with any certainly what the behavior of an individual electron might be. This is not the result of our limited observational tools, but instead seems to be a fundamental characteristic of the entities themselves. Our most accurate description of an electron is not a point like particle, but a spread-out wave of probability reflecting the likelihood that an electron exists. It was once though that given sufficient information about the initial state of a closed system, we could predict the future states of that system with perfect accuracy, but it now appears that this is not the case. No matter how complete our initial measurements, the eventual behavior is unpredictable. Early in the quantum revolution someone observed that “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Right. Perfect.
At the same time, unpredictability is not arbitrary chaos necessarily.
Personally, I don’t think that it’s the swerving of constituents so much as the formal properties of diodes and capacitors that makes the audible difference. This is why the differences become less audible as the math gets better and the CPU’s get faster.
To put it another way, suppose one employed a random generator from 1-10000000000000. What difference would that make to the sound? It’s sort of a silly thought. So this “randomness” is obvious dancing around a mean or something. But, again, I don’t think that’s the rub. What I do think is, is discrete systems exchanging characteristics under pressure. But also, the novelty is in part due to the uniqueness of the components, individual like snowflakes – the are snowflakes but none the same. However, in no sense would I claim their crystalline structures to be chaotic or random.
I may have been a bit imprecise in my terminology. While unpredictability is at the heart of chaos,
chaos (at least in the mathematical sense) isn’t randomness. There are patterns in a chaotic system. In fact fractals and chaos are deeply intertwined. I found this to be a good overview:
A perfect example is the chaotic oscillator at the heart of this plug-in
It’s based on a double pendulum which is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems are those in which small perturbations in initial conditions lead to large variations in the final state. The so called “butterfly effect”
The designer’s explanation of his approach is worth a look. He had to make adjustments to the model of his system to produce something musically useful.
One approach to digital synthesis is to attempt to create a mathematical model of a physical circuit and attempt to solve that model. Given the nature of non-linear systems, this proves to be a difficult problem at times. As the computational power available increases we are able to get closer and closer to the behavior of the system we are modeling. Ironically the original physical circuit was almost certainly designed by using a mathematical model approximating the behavior of the physical components. I guess we’ve come full circle in a sense. Some programmers have moved away from attempting to model physical systems and are attempting to create algorithms that manipulate sound on a more abstract level. After all why should we try to replicate what has gone before. Perhaps we should strive to create sounds that that are unique to the digital world.
Forgive my musings, I always enjoy our conversations, and you caught me in a loquacious mood. It’s nice to sometimes step back from the nuts and bolts and consider some of the deeper implications.
I look forward to when you might grace us with more of your modules. 
