The Looper - Fractal Audio FX8 Owner's Manual

12 : THE LOOPER

The FX8 has a global LOOPER with a maximum loop time of eight minutes in mono and four minutes in
stereo (half that if optional UNDO is enabled). Press the LOOPER footswitch to enter Looper Mode.
Seven footswitches have dedicated looper functions as indicated on the top panel.
UNDO
RECORD
RECORD – When you press RECORD, the looper starts recording. Here's a tip that is not quite as obvious:
you can press record again to stop recording and start playback. This makes it easy to set up a loop without
looking at your feet to change switches. If the looper reaches its time limit, playback will start automatically.
PLAY – Starts and stops looper playback.
ONCE – When ONCE is toggled on, looper playback will stop automatically at the end of the loop. If
playback is already stopped, ONCE will start playback, play through the loop, and then stop. You cannot go
directly from RECORD to ONCE.
DUB – Press to overdub new material on top of an existing loop. Pressing DUB again stops recording but
playback continues, so you can punch in and out at will. Please note that with each pass through the loop,
existing layers will gradually fade. To change this, increase
a more rapidly decaying/evolving loop, set this to a lower value.
UNDO – This removes the most recently recorded overdub. You can only undo one layer, and it needs to be
an overdub. (To throw away and re-do a first layer/take, just press RECORD again).
REV – Reverses the direction of the looper. Most other looper functions work while the direction is reversed,
so you can overdub to record forward and backward audio in the same loop.
HALF – Slows the looper to half speed. For double speed playback, record at half speed and then switch to
normal. You can even overdub to record audio at different speeds in the same loop!
WHY IS IT CALLED A "GLOBAL" LOOPER?
Audio systems products, the FX8 does not require you to insert a Looper Block into
every preset. The looper is in every preset, so playback or recording can easily continue across preset
changes. Looper parameters such as Mix, Level, Mode, Location and others, are NOT global, so you can
set these as desired per-preset.
HALF-SPEED REVERSE
PLAY
57
(no function)
ONCE DUB
(on the looper's
DUB MIX
12 : tHe Looper
page) to 100%. For
MIX
Unlike other Fractal