Bored of Audio Loopers? Bastl Instruments Release Midilooper, Designed to Loop & Mess With Your MIDI

Bastl have made a name for themselves releasing unique and unusual music gadgets over the last few years and their latest device looks fantastic. Midilooper sees the Czech company exploring something not-often explored in dedicated standalone hardware equipment: manipulating MIDI information.

The Midilooper is (as the name suggests) primarily a MIDI looper, but with a whole slew of neat tricks. The main advantages of looping MIDI over audio is that users can continue utilizing the sound sculpting parameters on their instrument to change its timbre, and there’s no need to worry about clunky end-of-loop to start-of-loop rotations — loops can just continue polyphonically with no awkward stop. For electronic instruments like synthesisers, this means you can quickly record a phrase and experiment with different presets and programming while it continues to playback.

Midilooper also lets you do neat things like sync and quantize to a MIDI or analog clock, change the octave of your sequence, add random note-velocity information so it ‘humanizes’ it (it won’t play the MIDI back exactly the same every time), doubling/halving the playback speed, and plenty more. Here’s the full rundown:

Features:

• 3 independent voices (each has MIDI channel assigned)
• overdub/overwrite
• transpose mode
• octave transpose
• quantize, velocity lock, shuffle, humanize
• odd looplengths, time stretch
• mute, clear, erase
• one MIDI Input and two MIDI Outputs
• clock input (accepts analog clock or TRS MIDI Clock)
• analog reset input
• metronome output
• CV input connectivity (transpose, velocity, re-trigger)
• pedal control (record, clear, voice selection)
• USB powered
• adjustable divider/multiplier for analog clock

bastl-instruments.com/instruments/midilooper