DIY Modular Oscillator Instrument Looper?

[RaincloudDev]

I have no Idea What To Call This Instrument!

I'm not even sure it's to be considered an "instrument" or just a random assortment of gear wired together in Just the right way to make something really neat happen. A tinkerer must have their toys, and as a musician of 20+years, I have toys. At some point in my musical career I got into the loopstation thing, but definitely couldn't afford to jump on a big fancy boss looper pedal. A single channel pedal ended up being all I could afford at the time, but that tiny pedal would inspire a wild idea!

This pedal has one button and one 3-way switch that controls playback speed. It can  be set to play the recorded loop in half-speed, normal speed, or reverse. The I/O is also simple on this pedal: one in, one out. It sounds basic but they packed a whopper inside this small form factor! First impressions were exceedingly GOOD.

[RaincloudDev]

Spending a few weeks with the pedal did however leave me wanting more functionality. Being limited to one input was beginning to be cumbersome. I spent some time going back over the boss loop-stations that were king at the time and the idea struck me! I could use some of my live sound rig to string all this together! The next portion of the process included all the basics of any full band setup: a ton of cables and too many instruments! The kicker in this whole setup is how the looper is wired into the rest of the system:

I ran the "Monitor" output on my audio console into the looper. The output of the looper then goes into a free channel on the audio console.  No matter how many instruments you have, this setup creates the ideal loop lab! I can't speak to how bad this is for your console, so I'm using an old analog console. I still assume as long as no channels are showing spikes and no signals are distorting it should be good to go.

[RaincloudDev]

This layout was a lot of fun to play with, and I honestly haven't played with the idea for at least 2 years, BUT IT IS TIME.

This time, I have a vintage HP 204C oscillator and Tektronix Oscilloscope from my granddad's collection and I wanna make em go! The oscilloscope needs some Probes, so that's on the side for this session. Just know it WILL be part of this rig in the end. I'm not sure if I'll need to amplify the oscillator signal or not, so I'll have an amp on hand. I'll go on and set up a microphone as well, for any other noises and instrumentals I want to add during the recording session.  As described above, the looper will be wired into the rig so I can play with some loopins. I'm escpecially excited to build chords and arpeggios. I should have a good amount of control of the signal this way as well, I look forward to frequency filtering and sweeping. Volume swells and violin tones!