Foreword - Nautilus QU-BIT Manual

Foreword

"No, sir; it is evidently a gigantic narwhal."
― Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
If I had to choose a desert island effect, it would certainly be a delay.
Nothing else offers the transformative powers that delays do. It is almost
supernatural, this ability to transform a single note into a compelling mu-
sical event. Sometimes, it feels like cheating, doesn't it?
My own experience with delay processors in a modular environment
started with a very simple BBD unit. The only controls were rate and feed-
back, and yet, I used that module to greater purposes than almost the
rest of my rack combined. This module also contained a behavior unique
to BBDs which proved very influential in my life; you could "break" it in
musical ways. When you push a BBD's rate control to its largest setting,
the leaky capacitor stages will open up a new world of grit, noise, and
unexplainable cacophony.
As a SCUBA diver, I am fascinated by things that live in the ocean. And
as someone who works with sound each day, the ability of marine mam-
mals to use audio signals to experience their world through echolocation
is truly mind blowing. What if we could model this behavior digitally, and
apply it to musical purposes in the hardware domain? That is the ques-
tion which inspired the Nautilus. It was not an easy question to answer,
and we had to make some subjective choices along the way (what does
kelp sound like?), but the end result was something that transported us to
new dimensions of sound and changed our conceptions of what a delay
processor could be.
Bon voyage!
Happy Patching,
Andrew Ikenberry
Founder & CEO
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