Good video to talk through it in a lot of detail (1h18min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF0wMb29Vmc
Basics
- Effects pedal
- Feedback: Feeds signal back to input. At 1.0 = full signal sent back, never fades. Any lower than 1, the signal will fade eventually. Higher than 1, the signal will increase.
- Drive: Adds a tape-style saturation to the sound.
- Suppressor/compressor: More to the left (SUP) = recorded sound is suppressed for new sound coming in. More to the right (COM) = all sounds will be kept quite high, including the already recorded sounds.
- 2 Delays: 2.5 sec - 9.5 sec - 22 sec. Blur causes cross-feedback between the delays. Drift adds a “panorama LFO”.
- 4 Delays: 2.5 sec - 8.5 sec - 11.5 sec. 4 delay lines that shift constantly relative to each other.
- Giant reverb: Blur and drift don’t do anything here.
- Granular: Blur and drift are modulation effects on the grain position. Blur uses noise, drift uses LFO.
- Record:
- Erase:
- Reverse: Multiple delays that are slowly blurring into a reverb-type effect. Blur and Drift don’t do anything in this setting.
- HPF:
- LPD:
Effects in more detail
Record
Hold Record and press the Revers/Select button to switch through the 3 different recording “modes”: only left channel (left LED on), only right channel (right LED on), both channels (both LED on). When only recording left or right channel, the loop delay is regular. When recording on both channels, there is an irregular delay, or a delay shift, on both channels, causing the loop to overlay and shift in different ways.
Drift
Moves the sound around in the stereo mix.
Drive
Have on low for most of the time.
Blur
Blurs the sounds over time into a mush that fades (if FB, Drive and COM are low). Adds “muddiness”. When the blurred sound has reached a nice level, turn it all the way down to “preserve” that blurred sound as a background to lay over things. Add Blur sparingly in from time to time, don’t have it on all on the time, otherwise things get quite muddy.
Reverb
Simulates an echo in a hall the size of several kilometers.
Making nice sounds
- If the sound gets too high:
- Turn down the feedback
- Turn down the drive
- Turn the SUP/COM towards SUP
- Delay 2 or 4: Record something on left channel, then something reverse on right channel. To do that, record normally on left channel, then activate Reverse before recording on right channel. Then when unpressing Reverse, the right channel loop will be played back in reverse.
- Set feedback to middle: sound will immediately start to fade and be gone within half a minute.
- For quick swell: increase Drive, FB or COM to max, then turn down again. Can bring a quiet signal back up.
- For keeping signal strength of loop at a constant level for a while: balance FB, COM or Drive so that the signal doesn’t die down.
- Delay 2 or 4: Blur some sounds a lot (by turning up Blur all the way), then when there’s a nice texture, turn it all the way off again to “preserve” it at a certain level. Can be increased or decreased by adjusting Drive/FB/COM.
- Magical birds with notes, increasing intensity:
- Delay 2, setting 3
- Record on one channel: little “bird/whale sounds” using the lap steel metal bar.
- Record on the other channel some nice notes played at different strength.
- Blur, Drift, Drive to half. FB 1, SUP/COM balanced.
- Turn on the OTO RAM pedal for super nice reverb.
- After a while it will get a bit too repetitive, then turn Blur all the way up and turn down FB, Drive and COM to make the signal fade away.