There’s a magic to tape. Not just the ‘ooh, that sounds lovely’ magic of tape saturation, but the compositional magic of Frippertronics or sound-on-sound looping. The magic of interacting with a machine and never being entirely sure what’s going to happen next. There are worlds of experimentation to explore with tape, but as anyone who has mucked about with the magnetic brown stuff will know, it’s not without its drawbacks: price, maintenance, capacitors going pop, thousands of feet of the stuff unexpectedly spooling onto the floor...
So imagine all of that potential for sound exploration contained within one convenient Eurorack module, all controllable by CV. Well, many people have, perhaps most notably Make Noise, but the latest device to take up the challenge of ‘tape without tape’ is the Stardust, which Qu‑Bit describe as a ‘cosmic tape looper’. The cosmic part is open to interpretation, but the tape looper part is fairly straightforward, and straightforward is what the Stardust is all about.
That’s not to say it can’t produce complex results — complex and surprising results — but that Qu‑Bit have done their best to make things simpler. Not just simpler than working with tape — that could hardly be more complicated — but simpler than other tape‑inspired modules. To this end the front‑panel functions and controls are clearly labelled and easy to understand. The only slightly cryptic element is the cosmos graphic that surrounds the central Varispeed encoder, the changing colours of which denote different states — useful if you can manage to remember what the colours mean. Everything else is fairly self explanatory. There are stereo inputs with level control, and stereo outputs with a wet/dry control; buttons for record, play, reset and reverse; loop start and size knobs... All of which do what you would expect. Slightly less expected, the Slice control not only slices the loop into increasing divisions as you turn it, but also randomly skips between slices (or splices in Stardust parlance); and Skip doesn’t skip between slices as you might expect but introduces ‘splice transformations’. This is probably where you’ll reach for the manual for the first time, but not understanding exactly what’s going on is no barrier to experimentation, and that’s what we’re here for, right?
There are built‑in effects including tape‑style hiss and flutter, digital degradation, high‑ and low‑pass filtering and a reverb that’s respectable enough that you could pair the Stardust with a single sound source and get an ambient album out of it.
Central to the Stardust, both physically and philosophically, is the Varispeed control. Like tape, changing the speed changes the pitch and, also like tape, if you, say, record with the Varispeed at half speed, what you’ve recorded will play back at twice the pitch when you return to normal speed (which you can do by pressing the encoder). This, and the fact that you’re only ever working with one loop (no reels here) is the Stardust’s main qualification as a ‘tape looper’. Next to the Varispeed control is the Inertia knob, which controls how quickly Varispeed changes take effect, creating greater tape‑style slowdown and stop effects as you turn it clockwise.
One area in which the Stardust comprehensively beats tape is in CV control. Everything bar Loop Mode and Effect Type has a dedicated CV input...
One area in which the Stardust comprehensively beats tape is in CV control. Everything bar Loop Mode and Effect Type has a dedicated CV input and there’s a clock input with which you can control Record, Reset, Slice, Skip and Freeze in a rhythmic fashion. Revox never thought of that, did they?
Lastly, but by no means leastly, the Stardust has four Loop Modes, the default being Sound On Sound, which, to quote the Orb, is for layering different sounds on top of each other. There’s also Replace, which replaces existing audio when you hit record, and Resample, which resamples the current loop along with any modifications you’ve made to it. Things can get delightfully messy here, but you can return to the original loop with the Undo button. Finally, Frippertronics mode mimics the method first popularised by Terry Riley as Time Lag Accumulation and later rediscovered and rechristened by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. In the original version the tape runs between two machines, the first of which records and the second of which plays back, creating a delay, the length of which is determined by the distance between the machines. The playback signal is routed back to the first machine to be recorded again, making a loop, and the level of the returned signal dictates how quickly the loop fades. Get this right and the loop will slowly fade out over a number of repetitions, degrading charmingly as it does so. Get it wrong and the loops will get louder with each repetition and eventually (or sometimes really quite quickly) feed back, not that that’s always a bad thing.
With Qu‑Bit’s version you set the loop length with your initial recording, and from then on the Stardust stays in record mode, gradually fading older loops as new ones are added. What you can’t do is control the amount of time it takes for loops to fade, but nor can you accidentally provoke it into ever‑increasing feedback, so swings and roundabouts. You can, however, stop recording to maintain the loop’s current level, which you certainly can’t do with tape. As a Frippertronics system makes recordings of recordings, with tape the fidelity will gradually decrease with each loop, often deteriorating into a bed of pleasingly fuzzy noise before disappearing completely. The Stardust’s approach is more clinical, but what you lose in character you certainly make up for in practicality.
The Stardust doesn’t sound like tape, but it will take you into the same experimental territory, whilst being much more practical.
That last sentence pretty much sums things up: the Stardust doesn’t sound like tape, but it will take you into the same experimental territory, whilst being much more practical. More practical because you’re not wrestling with a temperamental piece of 50‑year‑old recording equipment that may have ideas of its own, but also because you can do things that whilst technically possible with tape would take so long you’d never consider doing them. It’s also true that the impracticalities inherent with tape are enough to put most people off trying to use it in the first place, which makes the Stardust infinitely more practical. So yes, you sacrifice character with a module like the Stardust, but you also gain a lot of things you might never get to try otherwise, all of them controllable by CV.
The Stardust doesn’t have mesmerically turning reels or the welcoming warmth of tape saturation, but it does deliver some of the same magic as a tool for composition or sound design. You can take a simple piece of audio and surprise yourself with what it turns into, and that’s pretty magic.