Capstan
Four tape loops, one voice, no clock.
A four-channel free-running tape looper with a built-in synth voice, for iPhone and iPad.
Coming to the App Store
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Four loops. Four lengths. No clock.
One monophonic synth voice feeds four independent tape loops. Tap a belt to open it, play into it, tap to seal it. Each loop keeps its own length, so they scroll at different rates and slowly drift out of phase — a chord that never lands the same way twice. Every pass sums what you play over what is already there, and the FADE control tops out below unity by design, so every loop eventually dissolves. Polyphony is the layering. The synth is deliberately shallow. The tape is where the character lives.
A live tape-loop instrument,
not a DAW.
Play a pad, watch it spool onto tape, layer another loop over it, and ride four loops of different lengths as they drift and slowly dissolve. No tempo, no quantise, no metronome. Just tape — with the same Oxide colouring as its sibling, Oxyde.
Two reels, two idlers, a REC head and a PLAY head, carrying four nested belts — one per loop. The tape thickens where there is content and thins as the fade eats it.
A 4×4 grid over the scale you pick. X morphs the timbre, Y glides the pitch, pressure opens the filter. One note at a time — the loops are the chord.
Plaits engine cores behind a MODEL stepper and two macros. Drive and a mono reverb print into the loop, so a wet loop stays wet. Everything deeper lives behind the EDIT flip.
LEVEL, FADE and PAN per channel, in the channel colours. FADE is the feedback — the main performance control — and it never reaches unity, so every loop dissolves in its own time. Every loop sums through SPACE → OXIDE → LIMITER, and the master records to 24-bit WAV on device. The loops themselves are never saved.
