dear internet,

finding myself without full-time work for the first time in… 7, 8 years?… it seems like a Time to sit down and write about things i am doing / thinking of doing / intending to do.

there are always some ideas for musical tools sitting around on a mental shelf. one of these is always a “loop pedal” of some kind. a few days ago i decided to pull that idea down and begin working on it. this is a looper vaguely inspired by the 1994 gibson/oberheim “echoplex digital pro” (abbr. EDP) - it works in terms of looping layers of sound that can be manipulated, added to and extended in different ways and in relation to each other.

in my version, (working title mlp, but leaning towards doldrums as a “product”), i’m starting with the idea of layers being able to trigger, reset, pause and resume each other, as the building blocks for many of the “traditional” loop-creation and -sequencing structures (“multiply,” “insert,” “quantized,” “asynchronous” and the like,) but also perhaps for novel / complex / generative structures that are yet to be discovered / described.

exploring the space of what’s possible with a few, let’s say, loop-synchronization primitives, is the main point of the exercise. see, there was an EDP around my house in the 90’s, but i did not really use it much, and several of its characteristic modes remain basically unexplored by me. but they also seemed basically boring to me at that time. 30 years later my playing experience is significantly broader and i have a lot of appreciation for simple musical/time structures interacting in multiple ways. so.,

the other primary goal of this exercise is just to refine and re-evaluate my development skills, as i re-enter the process of soliciting freelance work and possibly applying for jobs. so i’d like to take this from concept to product quickly but cleanly, attempting a balance:

• avoid pre-emptive over-engineering for generality; this is a product, not a framework
• OTOH, i want to iterate efficiently yet meaningfully, and have an easy time with maintenance, so architecture needs to be pretty clean
• i want to stay on some sort of critical path to a future product, yet remain flexible about what the final targets are

and so on.

anyways, i’ve started a public repo on github (for better or worse:) https://github.com/catfact/mlp

this is still very much in personal-project mode - main branch may be broken WIP, docs and features are sparse, usage is clunky. however i expect to be pushing updates pretty rapidly.

and, first time for me, i’m keeping a development diary in the repo, including estimates of actual coding time per session: https://github.com/catfact/mlp/blob/main/diary/diary.md