• Loopscape Vinyl synth for Kontakt front panel
  • Loopscape Vinyl Kontakt synth rear panel

Loopscape Vinyl

(16 customer reviews)

30.00 plus VAT

Infinite loop synthesiser based on real vinyl recordings

Description

Buying Loopscape Vinyl entitles you to get its sister product, Loopscape, for half price! See our Hot Deals page to grab this offer.

“Bursting with warmth, crackle and analogue life” – Computer Music MagazineComputer Music 9 out of 10

“With three loops combined, the result is a lush and dense synthesiser sound, evolving and transforming constantly… it’s incredible.”

Film & Game Composers (reveiw of the original Loopscape)

Film and Game Composers logo

Genuine recordings of custom-pressed vinyl LPs • Classic synthesiser waveforms with added vinyl crackle, hiss, pitch drift and instability • Entirely new waves recorded from scratch to complement and extend the original Loopscape concept

DansetteOur original Loopscape took irregular, uneven strips of audio tape and looped them in a synthesiser framework, turning Brian Eno-style “incommensurable” soundscapes into a programmable, tweakable musical machine. Though we say it ourselves, it was pretty damn cool, spewing out weird, evolving, complex drifts and washes almost no matter what you did to it. Sound on Sound magazine said it was “dripping in oxide… you can almost taste the wow, flutter and print-through”. Well, now it’s time to taste the hiss, crackle and warp, because Loopscape is reborn – only this time, we’ve ditched the spools and reached for the platters…

Loopscape Vinyl starts with a host of entirely new recordings of classic synth waves: two ballsy sawtooths (one with a sub-oscillator) from our modular system, a smooth triangle from the Roland SH7, a gritty pulse wave from a Yamaha CS30, and a nice mellow sine. All of these were recorded in pristine quality, and then sent off to be pressed to a series of custom vinyl dub plates. Once we had our lovely new vinyl LPs back in the lab, we set about sampling the waves straight off the vinyl. And that’s where “pristine quality” and “high fidelity” went right out the window.

The whole fun of the original Loopscape was that it wasn’t clean, clear and precise – it was wonky, creaky and wobbly. Loopscape Vinyl carries on that proud tradition. Our turntable wasn’t reference-grade. In fact, it was a Dansette from the early 1960s. Our records weren’t wiped carefully with that little furry brush and put back in their sleeves after use, held only by the edges. In fact, Mongo may have dropped them down the stairs, and I may have “accidentally” spilt a beaker of Telecaster bridge screws and machine heads on some of them, leaving some unpleasant dings and scratches. There may have been dust, and grit, and some judicious application of a hair-drier. All in all, these aren’t going to win any awards for audio precision. What we were going for was the kind of sound you might get from an Optigan… if it had been reinvented as a synthesiser… built in the 50s… and then not-very-well maintained for half a century. In short, a bit of a relic.

LSV rear panelThe result is a collection of looping audio waves with some serious attitude and character. They’re gritty; they snap, crackle and pop more than a bowl of breakfast cereal; the loop points aren’t disguised so much as celebrated. With three different-length loops of between half a second and seventeen seconds up and running, plus a host of LFOs and other periodic fluctuations at your disposal, you can craft endlessly-changing, never-to-be-repeated soundscapes that are stamped through with the subliminal nostalgia of vinyl. There’s just something about the sound of a real record on a real turntable  with real scratches and crackles that brings a synth wave alive; and here, that vinyl DNA is built right into the synth itself. We even created the Noise wave by mixing endstop crackle with the sound of the Dansette’s stylus being scraped along the record edge – so it’s rather more unusual than standard white noise!

Loopscape Vinyl is not a precision instrument. Don’t expect cutting, clinical sounds from it: in fact, don’t expect two consecutive notes to sound the same, cos they won’t. What it is is a great way to get warmth, instability, movement and “incommensurability” into your tracks: it excels at pads, washes and background drifts, odd synthscapes, weird sound-design and generally all manner of vintage-style strangeness, all with that unmistakeable stylus-in-a-groove character. If you’ve been looking for the antidote to the modern digital “in the box” sound, you just found it.


(All our Kontakt instruments require a full copy of Native Instruments Kontakt v4.2.3 or higher (including all versions of Kontakt 5). Kontakt Player is not supported: instruments will load, but will time out after 15 minutes. See the FAQ for further information.)

16 reviews for Loopscape Vinyl

  1. JAMES (verified owner)

    There are numerous ways to bring the crackle and atmosphere of vinyl into your recording but leave it to the mad geniuses of RR to make a wonderfully playable and tweakable instrument out of the magic black platters. This is great for drones, pads and atmospheres, but the decent range of presets show you can do much more than that. I only dock the rating a star because of the lack of reverb in the GUI (I know I can go behind the interface…), and I really wish this instrument had “Glitch” like many of RR’s later creations (they’ve spoilt us!).

  2. mightbeacoolusername (verified owner)

    Amazing

  3. Lee (verified owner)

    A deep instrument with a lot of movement. Love the crackling.

  4. Poesque (verified owner)

    Eno. Minimalist. Repeat loop. Eno. Minimalist. Repeat loop. Eno. Minimalist. Repeat loop. Cut against the grain of the groove. Ah, yes.

  5. mrianrjohnson (verified owner)

    This is great. Have been using this for a few months now. Not sure which I prefer – this or the tapes, but I love the wonky charm that this brings, and as always it looks great too!

  6. DON Chaffer (verified owner)

    You can chew regular gum, or you can get that stuff from Willy Wonka that’ll last forever, and turn you into a blueberry. What’s my point? You could buy some crappy generic pad, or you could get this thing.

  7. Chris (verified owner)

    Like the original Loopscape only a bit different. But the same high quality wonky, evolving pads and textures.

  8. Stefano (verified owner)

    If with Platter you are able to recreate in a excellent way the atmosphere of old vinyl records, with Loopscape Vinyl you are able to produce always different and evolving texture, often with an abstract feel.

  9. Jesse Holden (verified owner)

    This is a wonderful tool for trip hop and gets you right into that lo-fi b-movie range that is oh so sweet. Amazing.

  10. JON (verified owner)

    Wonderful!

  11. Tom Furse

    Beautiful overlapping soundscapes and a really great alternative to my usual go-to analog synths.

  12. Stefan

    fantastic, crunchy and quirky addition to my plugins!!

  13. Dan

    Mongo’s twelve inch special. Epic. Instruments, washes, and funny noises you can’t make words for.
    Fills gaps you didn’t know you had. A little bird tells me there’s a 78 version in the cupboard somewhere..
    Five Stars!

    • The Professor (verified owner)

      We’re going to quote this on our publicity material as “Mongo’s twelve-inch special… fills gaps you didn’t know you had” 😀

  14. jj

    mindblowing!!!

  15. Caleb Hoh

    It’s a great way to flavor my tracks. I gives my music a natural feel with this fantastic vinyl emulator!

  16. Dan Warren

    Loopscape Vinyl is a fantastic addition to my palette of sounds. It’s a great way to add a bit of dirt, noise, and unpredictability to an overly clean track. It’s particularly well-suited to sound design and tracks with long droney bits. Spooky, ethereal, and lovely!

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