It’s fun to create soupy loops in the looper, Magnetic Dance and/or Disintegration Loop. Then it’s fun to play over those. It would be nice if we didn’t have to apply the same set of tape effects (wow, flutter, etc) to everything. What if you could dial up an extra wow-y hi-cut tone to lay down a drone, then a lo-cut tone with dropouts for a melodic motif, and while all that loops, solo over it with flutter and reverb?
If we had a toggle to print effect in the looper(s), we could record each track, or even each pass, with a different effect stack and then play over it with different or even no Ribbons effects in the mix.
My probable workaround will be some kind of parallel mixer so I can bypass Ribbons once I have my loop looping, but the ability to print effects rather than have them apply globally would be spectacular.
I love Ribbons. Thanks for making it. It’s really pretty amazing.
I was literally going to ask about this today: there’s no way to “bounce” into a loop right now which would be useful. Ribbons is already a very complicated pedal so I understand why it might seem overwhelming from a user experience perspective to have that capability (and I don’t know off the top of my head what the interaction should be if you were to do it). But essentially as of 2.0 Ribbons is a tape studio in a pedal, the only thing I can’t figure out is how to ping pong a la https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZanByojSCI
Seems unlikely. What would be an easier compromise would be to make a midi cc to have the 4-track looper run post-effects. This has been discussed and Jaak sounded down to implement it if there was enough interest. Post-effect looping would be huge for me and would allow for this “imprinting” a la Blooper, but not for the effects to accumulate after each pass.
Making every one of the 4-track tracks into the disintegration loop seems cumbersome. If every loop is running into the same effects to degrade it, then there is little difference between what you are suggesting and running the disintegration looper after the mix of the 4 looping tracks. The only way that would be possible would be to use the direction knob as a kind of “erase-head” mod, which would allow not only overdubbing but adjustable decay. This seems like a lot of leg work and a reworking of stuff that is integral to the pedal’s architecture. It would be cool, but just use the Disintegration Loop touch mode?
So, yeah, just creating the option to have the loop run post-fx is the way to go. This is the trouble with viewing Ribbons as an infinitely revisable sandbox. It tempts one to make it a cure-all, but the moment it can do everything, it defeats the point of it being a finite pedal with quirks that affect one’s playing in unexpected ways.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Ribbons is fantastic just as it is. I’m lucky enough to have gotten a new one with the 2.0 software already on board.
I just found myself creating some awesome soupy degraded loops and wanting to play a cleaner guitar on top of them. I’ve been thinking about options like a parallel mixer, but figured it couldn’t hurt to mention this idea here. I think the Mood 2 spoiled me a bit for this - the ability to apply the wet side to just the input, just the micro looper or to both.