RYK Time Slice

RYK sport one of my very favourite design identities in Eurorack: simple and classic‑looking, but at the same time incredibly modern. Happily, the company’s latest Eurorack design, the Time Slice, doesn’t break rank in this respect. A four‑channel looper and ‘sampling laboratory’, it’s a powerful module boasting numerous I/O options, a neat clutch of tactile controls, a retro, Eventide H3000‑style jog wheel and — I’ll go ahead and say it — one of the most elegant light displays on a Eurorack module you’ll find anywhere. Capture a sound, slice it up, reverse it, send it through an effect, resample it to another track... you get the picture. This is the kind of thing that got me into Eurorack in the first place.

With its ultra‑smooth digital audio processing, host of effects and a general proclivity for transport‑based explorations such as reversing, pitch and speed editing and internal resampling, the Time Slice is essentially RYK’s contribution to a growing list of tape‑reminiscent Eurorack samplers and loopers, many of which seem to have risen to flagship rank in their respective developers’ catalogues: there’s the Instruo Lubadh, the Qu‑Bit Stardust, the ALM/Busy Circuits Squid Sample, the Intellijel Multigrain, and of course the Make Noise Morphagene, probably the most famous of the lot.

LEDs Not Screens

RYK generally eschew screens in favour of simpler LED‑based displays on their modules; this serves to place the emphasis back on using your ears — not eyes — when patching. In this case there is a modest OLED screen to speak of, accompanied by Mod and Shift buttons and the (fun‑to‑use) jog wheel, which together constitute most of the navigation of the Time Slice’s functionality. The menus are generally clear and no more than a layer deep, and decently laid out when it comes to accessing track parameters, global settings, effects and so forth.

On the subject of the wheel, it’s not just there for novelty...