Redwood

Redwood is a micro-looper attached to an XY pad which adjusts the loop's pitch and length in musical ratios. Redwood was inspired by Radiohead performances in the early 2000s around the time that Kid A came out.  Essentially, Jonny Greenwood would sample little bits of Thom's vocals with a Korg Kaoss Pad and manipulate them in real time - stretch them, repitch them, just turn his vocals into an instrument of sorts.

The left side of the device contains typical looper controls.  The thru button allows audio to pass through the device - useful if you're singing live and just want to grab bits perhaps at the end of a phrase. Set the record length (in beats - this device shines with shorter audio chunks rather than longer loops), hit record (the record will begin on the next beat, and press play and you've got yourself a micro-loop.  

If you leave the play button turned on, the loop will begin playing as soon as the recording has stopped, which again, for live use, I think is the way to go.

To the right of these looper controls, we have the main component - the XY pad.  Out of the box, X is assigned to your MIDI keyboard's mod wheel and Y is assigned to the pitch bend wheel.  If you, like me, use a small Akai MPK Mini keyboard, the mod wheel and pitch bend wheel are actually a four-way joystick which translates perfectly to this device.  Though you can also assign whatever physical controls you like via the two small x and y knobs in the bottom left corner. Or just use your mouse - no rules.

The X plane (left to right) controls the length of the loop.  All the way to the left (0) will loop the entire recorded audio. As you move to the right, around the middle, you'll hear a halved version of your audio mixed in with the original length, and as you move a bit further to the right, that original full loop will fade out and you'll only hear the halved version.  Then as you get to the end, you'll hear a smaller snippet - a quarter of the original loop you recorded.

The Y plane (up and down) is for pitch-shifting combined with a touch of bit reduction at the more extreme settings. This is sort of modeled after some of my earlier devices, like Ambi, where the bits are reduced a bit as you shift higher and lower and it kinda gives a feeling of the way the fidelity of something recorded on tape is gonna change as you get to more extreme values.  Also, the pitch shifts not just through every available semitone, but in musical degrees - I've opted for fourths, which means that there's a very good chance that the sample is going to sound "good" or in key as you shift it up and down in the context of your song.  This was of course inspired by the Chase Bliss MOOD pedal, which has a similar pitch shifting algorithm.

That's the gist.  I think a nice way to play this live is to map some key or button to the record button, and then manipulate the XY pad however you like - either with a mouse, mod/pitch wheels, your MIDI controller, etc. As you sing, just grab a little tiny chunk of the vocal and then manipulate away.  To go further, you could map another key or button to the reverse control to be able to manipulate that, and map a dial or slider to this gain over here which affects just the loop's volume, so you can fade the effect in and out along with the song.

While I made this device with vocals in mind, I also found some pretty interesting results using drum loops and synth bits.. experiment and see what you find! 

I hope you find this useful.  It's an effect I love and I like that this device is pretty simple to use, has a lot of various sweet spots, and I hope you find some inspiration.