Ambient Guitar Instructional: “Hybrid Frippertronics” (Meditative Soundscape with a Tape Recorder)

I know that many of us - ambient music players - are fascinated with Frippertronics. This reel-to-reel live looping technique is widely discussed on YouTube.

The name hitchhiked over to the digital world meaning a sound-on-sound system where tape saturation and degradation were taken into account, as well as loops feedback control.

I always found this technique interesting and very “musical” due to the abovementioned aspects – tape saturation, wow, flutter and feedback control.

It does a very important thing – constantly changes your loop a little bit, but this “little bit” is very important – it forces our conscious to be focused on “what is going on there”. If things don’t change, we are bored very fast.

I would like to have the real reel-to-reel system with two different recorders/players, but the reality and limited space appeals to common sense – one need a spacious room and fair amount of money to afford these “toys”.

Thinking over the possible solution I came to the decision that some kind of hybrid Frippertronics might do the trick.

The other day I found this portable Superscope by Marantz CD-330 recorder with 3 heads and tried the idea. It worked great for me!

I got exactly what I was looking for – the texture!

The hybrid Frippertronics is relatively simple – I replaced one of the units with a digital delay, capable of setting a long delay time – 4 seconds and more. You can even try it with your DAW digital delay!

The first unit RECORDS the signal, then it’s PLAY head READS the signal right away with a slight delay of 60-70 mS (which is negligeable in our case) and this signal is sent FURTHER to the digital delay (100% wet).

Let’s say we set 8 seconds delay time. It means that we will hear the sound from the tape in about 8 seconds. This was the initial goal of the old reel-to-reel technique – long delay time.

What Fripp and Eno did was feeding the signal from the second tape recorder (digital delay in our case) back through the mixer to the first tape recorder. They got the desirable amount of the decay changing the volume of the feedback signal.

If the volume was equal of higher than the source signal the system started to overload and resulted into heavily distorted feedback.

In my system I use one tape cassette recorder to do both jobs - RECORD and PLAY. But I’ve substituted the distance between two recorders with a digital delay.

The maximum delay time of the Strymon Timeline is 2500 mS, but there is a trick I found years ago that can expand the delay time of this pedal up to 20 seconds.

This is the link to this “hack”:    • “Hack” your Strymon Timeline maximum ...  

All the mixing, signal’s send and return are managed in the audio interface’s mixer on my PC. It also gives me an advantage of recording several sources for later editing.

I record the incoming signal and the tape signal, as well as other send-returns from other pedals, because most of them are connected directly to the audio interface.

I use RME Fireface UC and Behringer ADA8200 ADAT extension that give me 8 stereo inputs and 8 stereo outputs in general with unlimited mixing and routing possibilities.

One of my intensions is to make a video about the way I set this versatile pedals connection.

Gear used:

Godin LGX SA
Soma Terra
Soma Enner
Ebow Plus
Roland VG-99
Strymon Riverside
Strymon Iridium
Strymon Volante
Meris Hedra
Meris Enzo
Chase Bliss Audio Mood MK2
Hologram Microcosm
Superscope by Marantz CD-330 - the main Frippertronics unit
Strymon Timeline - the secondary Frippertronics unit

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