Autobreak

An automatic breakbeat slicer. Load a drum loop, feed it a clock, and Autobreak chops it onto a 16-slice grid and rearranges it on the fly — turning an ordinary break into a stuttering, re-sequenced groove. Hold up to five loops and switch between them live.

How it works

The loaded loop is stretched across a tempo-synced 8-beat timeline divided into 16 slices. Autobreak reads the tempo from a single clock interval and locks instantly — no warm-up, no drift. On every clock pulse it leaps the playhead to the slice chosen by the Sequence input, so driving Sequence from a step sequencer reshuffles the break in real time. With Sequence at zero the loop just plays straight through.

Controls

  • 1–5 — five sample rows; click a row to load an 8-beat drum loop into that slot.
  • Wav — selects which of the five loops plays live.
  • Attn — attenuates the Wav CV input, scaling how far incoming voltage swings the selection.
  • Ratchet — sets roll density (Off, ×2, ×3, ×4, ×6, ×8); higher settings re-fire the current slice for stutters and drum rolls.
  • Break grid — waveform display with the 16-slice grid and a live playhead showing where in the loop you are.

Inputs & outputs

  • Clock — the tempo source, required for playback. Feed it 8th notes for the loop to play at its sampled tempo; every pulse hard-aligns the playhead and triggers the slice jump.
  • Sequence — a 0–10V slice selector; on each clock pulse the playhead jumps to this slice. Patch a sequencer here to rearrange the break.
  • Wav — 0–10V CV that selects the live loop, summed with the Wav knob and scaled by Attn.
  • Ratchet — 0–10V CV over roll density, added on top of the Ratchet knob for momentary rolls.
  • Reverse — gate input; at 2.5V or above the loop plays backward.
  • Reset — returns the playhead to the top of the loop.
  • Out L / Out R — the stereo output.

Tips

  • Clock with 8th notes first; a 16th-note clock plays the loop twice as fast and a quarter-note clock half as fast — pick whichever matches the sample's length.
  • A slow LFO into Wav swaps loops mid-phrase for instant variation.
  • Ride Ratchet CV into the high steps on the last beat of a bar for classic drum-roll fills.