Beat Freeze

Grabs a tempo-synced window of audio from the recent past and loops it forever — time gets stuck on a slice of your signal. Feed it a beat and it stutters, suspends, and loops the groove in place, holding the moment while the music moves on around it.

How it works

Beat Freeze is always recording your stereo input into a buffer. On demand it snapshots a window starting Look beats ago and running Len beats long, then loops that window seamlessly. To keep the loop from sounding static or clicky it reads with two crossfading heads and quietly re-captures fresh audio about once per beat — so the freeze tracks the live signal's tone without ever breaking the loop. Hold stretches or freezes that recapture interval, choosing between a freeze that breathes with the live signal and one locked dead-still. Mix decides whether you hear the frozen loop alone or layered against the live input.

Controls

  • Look — how far back the frozen window begins, from 1/32 up to 32 beats. Small values grab the immediate past; large values reach back across phrases.
  • Len — the length of the captured window, which is also the loop length, from 1/4 to 8 beats. Short loops stutter; longer loops freeze whole bars.
  • Mix — blends the live input against the frozen loop. At 100% you hear only the freeze; pull it back to lay the loop over the original.
  • Hold — sets how often the freeze re-grabs fresh audio. Fully down it refreshes about once per beat, so the loop quietly evolves with the live tone; turn it up to stretch the gap between recaptures (1x to 16x); fully clockwise it stops recapturing altogether for a hard, identical-every-bar static loop.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo signal to record and freeze; L and R are captured independently, so the freeze keeps your stereo image intact.
  • Look / Len / Mix / Hold CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to scrub the window's position and length, ride the blend, or shift the refresh rate for shifting, glitchy re-captures.
  • Clock — sets the tempo while the Clock control is on Ext. The interval between pulses defines a beat, so Look and Len stay locked to your song; unpatched it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — on each rising edge, re-snapshots the window, hard-grabbing a fresh slice aligned to that instant.
  • Out L / Out R — the processed stereo output.

Tips

  • Patch your master clock so the frozen loop locks to the track's tempo, then automate Look to rewind through the groove.
  • Trigger Reset in time with a fill to seize a new moment exactly where you want it.
  • Sweep Len CV down toward 1/4 beat for rapid stutter rolls, then open it back up to release into a longer suspension.