Quarolla
Ball Looping
- • Four live loops, each with its own motion
- • Glide, reverse, swing or stop each loop
- • Scrub by hand, by CV, by wheel or at random
Catch it, then set it rolling
Quarolla is a four-voice motion looper. Every note you play catches a fresh piece of whatever is coming into its audio input and turns it into a ball: a short loop rolling in its own glass tube.
The moment a ball is caught, it starts to move. It leaves at the original speed and glides, over a time you choose, to a speed of its own: slower, faster, or all the way down to a tape stop. It can run forwards, backwards, or swing to and fro like a pendulum. Each of the four balls has its own row of motion and scrub controls, and its own lamp to switch it on or off, so four notes in a row can take on four different characters, and you can bring balls in and out as the music moves.
In TAPE mode, speed bends the pitch like varispeed. In LOCK mode the pitch stays put while the ball crawls, races or freezes, and the keyboard transposes each ball from a root note.
A scrub section pushes each ball around inside its loop, with sweeps, random jumps, a chance control and smoothing. You can also drag a ball by hand on the display, scratch all four at once with the spring-loaded ALL wheel, or steer each one from CV, either winding there like tape or cutting straight to the new place.
Feed it a synth you are playing, a vocal, a drum loop or a mixer send. The dry signal can pass straight through, so Quarolla can sit inline and add its balls on top of the source. On the back, each ball has its own stereo output, gate, note and scrub inputs, and a playhead CV output, and a threshold knob decides which sequencer steps are strong enough to catch a ball.
Freeze a moment, slow it into a drone, stack a phrase into a chord, or scratch it. All of it happens live, and every ball is caught fresh.