Beat Slice

A clock-synced beat shuffler. It captures the incoming stereo audio and, on every slice boundary, replays a randomly chosen chunk from recent history — turning a tidy drum loop into a stuttering, ever-mutating breakbeat that stays locked to your clock.

How it works

Beat Slice continuously records its input into a rolling buffer that holds the last several beats. At each slice boundary it jumps to a random point inside that history pool and plays forward from there for one slice length, then picks again — crossfading the seams so the joins stay click-free. Because the choice is random every time, the loop rearranges itself endlessly instead of repeating.

Controls

  • Pool — how far back the random pick can reach: 4, 8, 16, or 32 beats. Bigger pools let slices wander further from the live audio for wilder shuffles; small pools stay close to what just played.
  • Div — slice length, stepped from a 1/32 note up to a dotted whole note, with a dotted step after each division. Short divisions chop the input into frantic stutters; longer ones rearrange in bigger, more recognizable chunks.
  • Smooth — how gently each seam is crossfaded, from 0 ms razor-hard cuts (clicky by design) up to 25 ms soft, washy joins that smear the transient as one slice hands off to the next. The default sits tight at ~1.3 ms for punchy, nearly invisible seams; dial it up for blurred, smeared stutters.
  • Mix — wet/dry blend. Fully wet replaces the input with the sliced version; lower settings ghost the slices over the untouched audio.
  • 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 audio to slice; feed it a breakbeat or any rhythmic source.
  • Pool / Div / Smooth / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO, envelope, or random source for hands-off, evolving mangling.
  • Clock — sets the tempo while the Clock control is on Ext; the interval between pulses defines the beat. Unpatched, it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — realigns the slice phase to the start of the bar; pulse it on the downbeat to keep chops in step.
  • Out L / Out R — the rearranged stereo output.

Tips

  • Patch in a clean loop and a steady clock, then ride Div for instant fills.
  • A small Pool with a short Div stutters close to real time; a big pool pulls slices from further back for more disorienting reshuffles.
  • Modulate Div CV with a slow or random source for chops that never settle into a pattern.
  • Leave Smooth near zero for aggressive, clicking glitch cuts, or push it up to melt the seams into soft, washy stutters.