Was messing around tonight, doing things I couldn’t understand, things I wouldn’t understand, things I shouldn’t understand… until now! I present to you,
Ping Pong Looping on the Rytm!!mtyR eht no gnipooL gnoP gniP
Now, before you get all technical and lawyered up, no it’s not a full on ping pong looping mode, but you can definitely scan through a long sample as if it were tape.
The Set Up
Get a nice four bar loop where you can definitely tell if it’s playing backwards or forwards, like a synth arp. Infinite amp decay. Turn SRC all the way down and SMPL all the way up, we just want the sample playing. The START should be at 0, the END at 120. Turn LOOP to ON.
On the TRIG page, turn SMP to ON (default). Expand the measures to 64/64.
The Trick
On the track of your sample, place a trig on step 1.
Then, put a trig on step 9. Now, go to the SMP page, and for that step 9 trig, plock the START to 120 and the END to 0. For even neater ideas, plock the TUNE to +5, you’ll see.
Now play it… And as soon as the first trig hits, on the TRIG page turn SMP to OFF. The loop will go to the 9th step and then FROM THAT POINT play backwards, then forwards again when it hits the first trig. If you messed with the tuning, it will even rewind PAST the beginning point and then go forward again at regular speed.
You could do some weird fake record scratching if you mess with the tuning for each plock.
If you want, you can put a plocked SMP=ON trig somewhere and only have it trigger FIRST time through, etc etc.
Are y’all even actually trying these tips? They’re pretty fun.
If you look at my “16 Track Rytm” tip, you could take that idea and have 8 independent loops doing weird ping ponging back and forth kinda stuff, like tape machines being run forwards and backwards.
You could put the same loop on two tracks, pan one left, the other right, and then instead of plocking the TUNE to +5 you could plock the FINE TUNE to a value and have the two slowly drift in and out of sync. This would work good on like someone talking, I think, trippy and phasey.
EDIT: Here, have an example: