Beat Reverse

A tempo-locked reverse effect. It keeps a running history of the audio passing through it and replays an earlier beat backwards, in perfect lockstep with the current beat — stuttering, time-folding glitches that still land on the grid.

How it works

Feed it a clock and it learns your beat length from the gaps between pulses (one pulse per beat). As the current beat plays forward, the read head walks backwards through the audio of the beat that happened N beats ago: the start of the live beat plays the tail of the old one, and by the end of the beat you've reached the old beat's first sample. At the default Speed of 1x the lookback stays in step with the clock, so the reversed material resolves cleanly on the next downbeat instead of smearing; dial Speed away from 1x and the read head rakes through the history faster or slower than the beat, pitching the reverse and breaking that strict lockstep for glitchier results. It's an insert effect — at full mix the reversed signal replaces the dry one.

Controls

  • Beats — how far back the reverse reaches. The knob spans 1/32 to 32 beats on an exponential curve, but the effect only engages from one beat up: below the centre detent (one beat) the dry signal passes straight through untouched, and from there larger settings throw back whole reversed phrases.
  • Speed — how fast the read head rakes back through the old beat, from 0.25x to 4x around a default of 1x. At 1x it sweeps exactly one beat of history per beat and the reverse keeps the source's pitch; push past it to pitch the reversed audio up and chew through several beats at once for glitchier flurries, or pull below 1x to drop it an octave and stutter, repeating fragments as the head crawls.
  • Mix — wet/dry blend. At 100% the reversed tap fully replaces the input; back it off to layer the reverse under the dry signal.
  • 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 — stereo audio to capture and reverse; the input's stereo image is carried through untouched.
  • Beats / Speed / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO to Speed CV for warbling varispeed reverses, sweep Beats CV to shift the lookback on the fly, or ride Mix CV to fade the reverse in and out.
  • Clock — one pulse per beat sets the tempo and the reverse grid while the Clock control is on Ext. Unpatched, it sits at 120 BPM. In Song the reverse grid is taken from the timeline's position, so it stays aligned across seeks and loops.
  • Out L / Out R — the processed stereo signal.

Tips

  • Always clock it from the same source driving your drums, or the reversals will drift off the beat.
  • The lower half of Beats (under one beat) passes dry — keep it at the centre or beyond for the reverse to bite, and reach toward 32 to flip back whole bars.
  • Sweep Beats CV slowly while a loop runs to rummage backwards through your recent past, never quite repeating.
  • Nudge Speed off 1x for pitched-reverse glitches — up for chittering octave-up flurries, down for stuttering, half-speed repeats that no longer land on the grid.