LoopBox

A looper you play like an instrument

LoopBox turns Move's pads into sixteen independent tape loops that never have to agree on a length or a downbeat. You layer sound freely, then treat every loop as raw material: re-pitched, re-ordered, filtered, granulated, frozen, with the whole surface live under your hands.

Your first loop in a minute

1. Open LoopBox from the Overtake / Tools list in Schwung. The left 4×4 pads are your loops; the right 4×4 are punch-in effects.
2. Record. Tap an empty left pad to start recording, tap again to close the loop and play. It loops instantly.
3. Layer. Tap other empty pads and record more loops on top. They run independently: no need to match lengths.
4. Shape it. Press a step button to select a loop and see its waveform. Turn the eight knobs to sweep Filter, Pitch, Scatter, Seed and more across its four pages (Up/Down change page).
5. Punch an effect. Hold a right pad: Haze, Freeze, Chop: over the whole mix. Press harder for more. Shift+pad latches it hands-free.
6. Send to a reverb. On loop page 1, turn Send A up; open Send FX (track button 3) and choose Veil or Space. Then Save it all to a session with the record button.

Full-exit is Shift+Back. A plain Back only suspends, keeping your loops in memory.

Where everything lives

What you see

Three views. A touched knob takes over the header with the parameter's full name and value; the views fall back to the overview after ten seconds.

What goes onto the tape

Everything you record passes through the input stage first, so set it before you play. The Input FX menu (track button 1) holds the monitor level, the tape style, input gain and a three-band EQ. The Input Tape page (Capture button) is the machine itself: 13 styles including a true Tapeless bypass, drive, wow, flutter, HF rolloff, low cut, hiss and Generations, the sound of repeated dubbing. Whatever you dial here is printed onto the loop.

Sixteen tapes, four heads each

Each loop records up to 45 seconds of stereo audio and plays back on its own clock. Three overdub modes shape how layers build: Replace, Multiply (endless decayed layering), and Disintegration (the loop's own effects re-bake each pass, so it slowly falls apart).

Every loop is read by up to four playheads at once, each with a mode: Off · Fwd · Bwd · Ping: and its own speed from 0.25× to 4×. One recording becomes a canon, a drone, or a shifting cloud. Heads sum with equal-power normalisation so stacking never clips, and any head that jumps crossfades.

The four loop pages

Select a loop with a step, then Up/Down to move between pages. Speed re-pitches like tape (pitch + tempo together); Pitch shifts independently, leaving tempo alone.

Two buses, the Palette engine

Each loop has two sends (A on loop page 1, B on page 2) into a pair of shared effect buses: the Palette engine, 29 effects, chosen in the Send FX menu (track button 3). Every effect has the same three knobs, Amount, Macro and Drift, so a bus can be re-voiced live without relearning it.

The buses are 100% wet: the loop's own level stays dry, the send sets how much reaches the effect. The returns join the master before the punch effects, so a punch can grab a reverb tail too.

The right pads: sixteen momentary effects

Hold a pad to apply an effect to the whole mix, reading a rolling 2-second capture of the master. Up to five stack in series, each with four parameters on knobs 5–8, and pad pressure drives a per-effect expression shown in the footer.

A per-effect LFO on every pad

While a pad is held, knobs 1–4 are its own LFO: Dest (which of the four fx params to modulate), Shape, Rate (0.05–20 Hz) and Depth. Eight shapes: sine, triangle, saw, ramp, square, pulse, sample-and-hold, and smoothed random: for anything from a slow drift to chaotic wobble. Knobs 5–8 stay the effect's parameters.

The ✕ button: sequencing punch effects

One shared 16-step pattern of punch effects, in the spirit of the Polyend MESS. Each step can hold up to five right pads with their knobs and pressure locked at the moment you write it, so a step keeps sounding the way it did even if you edit the pad later. Every gesture starts from the ✕ (Delete) button.

The FX Seq page

The clock runs from the Move tempo. A step retriggers its effects the way a finger would, through a short fade; a pad you are holding by hand is never cut by the sequencer. Gate below Hold releases the effects part-way through the step unless the next step is an extension. Like Last follows the previous evaluated step; Play X Skip Y counts cycles per step. The pattern and all its locks save with the session.

The master is a performance surface too

The Perform menu (track button 2) has two pages. Page 1 is the Stumble stochastic glitcher plus Jump and Scan. Page 2 is a master processing block:

Output character (Settings page 1)

An end-of-chain colour section: a character EQ modelling ten hardware units, a bus glue compressor, and an analog tape limiter.

Settings page 2 holds arm threshold, overdub mode, root note, MIDI, and the punch-FX stereo width (mono → wide, per effect).

Save the whole rig

Thirty-two slots on the record button next to Capture. A session stores every setting, the punch-pad values, the FX-sequencer pattern and all recorded audio. Saving over a used slot asks first; each is date-and-time named, and the header shows which session is loaded. All disk work happens on a background thread, never on the audio callback, so saving never glitches playback. Sessions live under /data/UserData/schwung/loopbox-sessions/ and survive reinstalls.

Every gesture

Standing on open work

LoopBox is free and open source under GPL-3.0. It builds on Schwung, Mutable Instruments Clouds & Warps, Signalsmith Stretch, Airwindows, Jon Dattorro's plate, and the sibling instruments Res, Essaim, Phasma, Palette, Magnéto and Signal. Full list in the repository.