Groove Rider 2 | Session 42: Enso Looper

⚡️LOUD NOISE WARNING⚡️ This video may involve or include experimental sound design, connecting powerful sound processing modules together in almost endless ways, sometimes creating extremely loud feedback loops, howling oscillations or badly distorted signals, suddenly and without warning. Please be cautious and use moderate volume levels with your speakers or headphones. Hearing loss and hearing conditions like Tinnitus are permanent and irreversible. Nobody wants that, nobody needs that. Remember, the health and safety of your sound equipment, including your hearing, is your responsibility. ✅ --- Video Notes Here I am demonstrating a live performance with Enso Looper in Groove Rider 2. From the Enso manual ... Enso Overview Before we dive into the details, we'll describe Enso's overall architecture and introduce a few terms. At the risk of oversimplification, Enso can be thought of as an audio recorder somewhat similar to a tape recorder or a voice-memo app on a smart phone: it records audio and plays it back. It plays the audio as if it’s a loop; that is, when it reaches the end of the recording, it starts over at the beginning. The audio is recorded in what we call the loop buffer. Making a new recording sets the length of the loop. There is only one loop buffer so Enso can hold only one loop at a time. However, the loop buffer has four regions called sectors. Sectors can span the entire loop buffer or any portion of it and can overlap each other. Once you’ve recorded a loop, you can play a portion of it by playing one of the sectors. You can also erase, rerecord, and overdub within sectors. Enso can play loops faster or slower than the speed at which they were recorded. Just like a tape recorder, if you play the loop faster and slower, its perceived pitch increases and decreases. Enso will follow tempo changes in your host DAW by speeding up and slowing down in sync. In a deliberate nod to its roots, Enso does not apply any sort of pitch or tempo correction when changing speed. Among other things, Enso is a tool for exploring the weird and sometimes wonderful things that happen when audio is played faster and slower than usual. Enso can also play the loop backwards, and even play in one direction while recording in the other. As audio is played from the loop buffer, it passes through a series of effects. These effects distort, soften, and/or blur the loop to give it a new character or make it blend well with new material added on top. Depending on how Enso is configured, these effects can either affect the loop only once as it plays, or in a cumulative manner as it is fed back and re-recorded. Overdubbing: Two Modes The DUB IN PLACE button affects how new audio is added to the audio already present in the loop when overdubbing. If DUB IN PLACE is turned on, the new audio is added directly to the old audio already in place in the loop buffer, after the old audio's loudness is reduced by the amount set with the FEEDBACK control. For instance, if feedback is set to 50%, overdubbing reduces the old signal by half, adds the new signal, and stores the result back into the loop. This is the way that most contemporary looper pedals and programs work. If DUB IN PLACE is turned off, Enso behaves more like a long delay constructed with a tape recorder. The new audio is added to the output of the loop player as it is played, and the mixed signal is recorded into the buffer. Again, before the two signals are added together, the FEEDBACK control determines how much of the old signal is added to the new signal. Dub In Place and Effects Routing An important distinction of these two modes is that when DUB IN PLACE is off, the feedback signal passes through Enso's effects before it is added to the incoming signal and re-recorded. When DUB IN PLACE is on, the effects are applied only to the output signal. In other words, if DUB IN PLACE is off, the effects are cumulative, or “stack”: the effects are re-applied to the signal with each cycle of the loop. If DUB IN PLACE is on and you briefly wiggle any of the effects controls while overdubbing, you won’t hear your wiggling on subsequent passes through the loop. If DUB IN PLACE is off, you will hear your wiggling because that signal was re-recorded into the loop buffer. Back to me ... For those interested, I am working here in the Groove Rider 2 DAW inside just one part. I have Rozeta Rhythm euclidian sequencer set up as a midi FX layer and pushing it's MIDI straight into Ruismaker drum synthesizer which is set up as a second layer AUv3 instrument in the same part. Also in the same part I have Enso Looper set up as an insert FX where all the action was happening with the DUB IN PLACE button turned off. I am sending the part signal using Send A to EOS reverb and Send B to Groove Rider's stock Delay FX.