Loop Guitar 1

Mr Sandbags

A demo track for a new Reaktor instrument I’m building codename: Mimetron.

Loop Guitar 1 is a long, flowing, ambient piece. Mellow with a few moments of grit.

Mimetron is a 3 voice sampler that is driven by incoming audio. It has 3 channels each of which has a tuneable 4-pole bandpass filter at the head with a gate-on/gate-off levels and attack/release settings.

When the input signal from the filter exceeds the gate-on threshold the sampler plays the loop for that channel, using the rising & falling amplitude levels as an envelope over the loop volume. When the incoming signal falls below the gate-off level the loop gets released and decays away.

There is a distortion and delay unit per channel and the incoming signal, again, controls the amount of the clean signal from the sampler that passes through those effects. The distortion can easily get a bit wild but I have it under control here.

The sample I’m using is, itself, a loop from Kent Sandvik’s ‘Experimental Guitars’ vol.3 Some nice stuff in his collection and all free.

The instrument is being driven by Lazyfish’s awesome new TG-8H tone generator and the “scenes” in the piece arise as I switch between some pre-chosen snapshots for that instrument.

I captured the sound directly from Reaktor and added a little reverb (Valhalla Shimmer) and compression (PSP Vintage Warmer 2) in Amadeus Pro.