Pear

[ringsandrocks]

Pear

Dual manual tape player for Arc and Max.

Two manually played tape heads on a shared loop with controls for sample/bit rate and overdub and timestretch toggles. Loosely inspired by the Landscape HC-TT and with arc code and inspiration from @trickyflemming’s capstarc.

Requirements

Arc
Max

Documentation

Further documentation is included in the Max Patch.

Known Issues

(I’d love any advice on these)

• Noise at start/end of loop (despite loop interpolation being on)
• Tape ‘degrades’ over time – some audio crackles are created on the loop
• occasionally freezes for a few seconds then catches up

Version

1.0.1 - volume control now functional and added a pre-gain dial (be careful, it goes to 6)

Download

v1.0.1 - Pear 101.maxpat (245.0 KB)

[swhic]

nice, we need more arc stuff!

[tyleretters]

This looks awesome. Thank you for sharing. I’m going to work with it.

[ringsandrocks]

Thanks! I’d love to hear it if you feel like sharing

[kasselvania]

I’m getting a problem of EXTREMELY low volume (basically barely even shows up on the wave form and is inaudible) coming in from my audio interface. Any way in patch to boost that?

[ringsandrocks]

Thanks for the heads up! I don’t have my laptop in front of me but the volume dial on the right side in presentation mode will help a bit and a quick fix would be to open up the patch and change the scaling of that dial to allow for higher gain. I should have a chance tomorrow to try to do a proper fix

[kasselvania]

Thanks! As a visual reference, this is the level of audio Max was showing from an input that was coming through pretty hot in a DAW like Ableton:

Now, I’m a little new to Max, so maybe I didn’t have my audio hot enough in there? But I couldn’t find a good way to improve that…

[ringsandrocks]

I just uploaded a new version with a fix. Please let me know if you have any trouble with it!

The volume dial wasn’t doing anything because I’d used [scale~] instead of [scale] so that’s fixed, and I added a pre-gain dial that will let you boost the incoming signal if needed. The input level also depends on having the 2nd from the right ring turned fully to 3 o’clock. Hope that helps!

[kasselvania]

Awesome!!! I’ll try to give this a shot tomorrow. Thanks so much!

[infovore]

one little bit of funkiness: my 3rd arc dial has the top right quadrant pegged on. (this might be an issue with the arclike I’m using, not your code) - but I’m just curious as to what correct behaviour for dial 3 is: got the two toggles for timestretch, and the fullbright blink for “0” (but only when travelling right-to-let); what else should it do?

[ringsandrocks]

Here’s a clip of how it looks for me. In the centre the recorded audio is unaffected, to the right it overdubs from the input, and to the left it overdubs silence. I’m happy to try to patch it but I’m not familiar with arclike at all so I’m not sure how to approach it.

The code for that ring is in [p dub] on the top left of the patch, and the input is sent to the mix section to the right of that. In the mix section you should be able to see if the mix amounts are coming through so we can see if it’s an issue with the input or just with the lights.

Pear Arc Ring 3

[kasselvania]

Just spent some time with this and love it! Really awesome stuff. Really fun and musical.

As an aside, is there a chance to have the option of setting a little momentum? This way, you might be able to let go of the knob and have a slight amount of drop off, instead of a hard cut.

I found that I could mitigate the issue by throwing some heavy Verb on there in concert hall form, but it could be cool to know I could take my hand off the knob for the bit depth and not have it go straight to silence.

Otherwise, I LOVE this, a whole lot of fun with the OP-1!

Also, I might be insane… But are the two buffers slightly offset from one another in terms of timing? I’m finding that what knob 1 has at 6 o’clock, knob 4 has at 3 o’clock… Not at all an issue, just interesting.

[ringsandrocks]

So glad to hear that you’re enjoying it! I can imagine it being great friends with the OP-1 I really like playing or singing in melodies then building harmony by holding notes from two different spots in the recording.

I tried to get momentum working with the slew parameter (which you can still adjust on the interface I think) but I couldn’t get it to slow to a stop nicely - it would either cut or take way too long to stop. I’d love to have that working too and I’ll try again soon.

The buffers might be - I was having a bit of drift weirdness. Mostly I notice it when I play backwards and forwards over a sound - sounds seems to be in slightly different spots in each direction. It’s a bit of a bug/feature thing though because it makes it easy to play back and forth over a sound.

[infovore]

no, it’s not something you should patch! “Arclike” is just a term I made up to describe the homebrew thing I’m using. I’ll kick some more tyres next week. Thanks for the video, it’s helpful.