Straight Out of Bollywood
Pitch Innovations is a unique company. Calling themselves “the first music software company from Bollywood,” they do things a little differently than most other companies. I’m a fan of their Fluid Chords 2 and Eternal Arps, both of which find an intuitive balance between technology and musicality. When I heard that they had a sample slicer out, I was intrigued. As someone who loves working with breaks, and who also likes how Pitch Innovations approaches things, I was curious to see what kind of a spin they would put on sample chopping.
I was not disappointed.
From Loop To Kit
The name of the plugin is a giveaway: Loop2Kit turns your loops into kits. Drop a loop —either percussion or melodic-based — onto the plugin, and it will create a set based on the audio content. Unlike some slicers, which keep the focus on the original loop, this breaks the pieces out into separate parts and maps them across a MIDI playing field, either for pads or your keyboard. It puts the kicks in one slot, snares in another, hats in a third… you get the idea.
The marquee selling point is the round robins. Rather than segregate every slice into a separate slot, it groups similar sounds together. Now, when you hit a drum pad or key, the plugin will rotate through the sounds in that group, preventing the dreaded machine gun effect from occurring. The plugin will also intelligently choose the most appropriate hit to be the ‘star’, the sound you hear most often. You can change this to whatever sound you prefer, although the plugin does an admirable job of selecting the one that I’d most often use.
As mentioned before, you’re not restricted to just percussive material. When you first drop your loop onto Loop2Kit, you’ll be asked to choose one of four detection algorithms. Three (Drums, Percs Solo, and Percs Heavy) are for drums, while the last is Melody. Pitch Innovations claims that the DSP is pitch aware, and it does indeed group sounds by note.
Slice and Dice: Creating a Kit
There’s more to Loop2KIt than just sample slicing though. Most DAWs can handle basic loop-to-MIDI duties; Loop2Kit thankfully provides a number of additional editing facilities that extend its usefulness beyond just chopping.
Looking at the GUI, Loop2Kit represents your loop as a waveform, with different sound types color-coded. There are slice markers as with Ableton Live or other programs, and you can move and add them as you see fit (although the algorithm does a pretty good job in general). There’s a sensitivity slider in case detection doesn’t catch every sound, and you can also increase or decrease the number of groups. Additionally, the program generates three different group variations to play with.
Below the waveform is the editor, with tabs for both Group and Round Robin editing. Here you can alter the characteristics of either all sounds in a group or individually in the Round Robin section. You can adjust the pitch, envelope, volume and panning. There’s also a non-resonant filter for tone shaping plus transient and drive controls. At the slice level, you can set fades around the waveform, playback direction, and adjust time stretching.
The plugin can handle one-shots too — just drag and drop onto a pad to include it.
At the global level, there are additional controls, including sample fade in and fade out, an ADSR, a Character section with dials like LoFi and Punch, overall high and low cut, plus reverb and delay controls. It would be great to have reverb and delay at the group level as well but it’s easy enough to add effects to separate elements in your DAW through the plugin’s routing features.
You Spin Me Right Round: The Sequencer
As a nice bonus, Loop2Kit also contains a step sequencer. Radial rather than linear, you place the grouped drum sounds onto concentric rings that trigger as the sequencer goes around.
You can adjust swing on a per-sound basis or to the whole sequence, and you can also adjust the density of individual sounds, increasing their frequency, and rotate the whole affair stepwise. Once you have a sequence that you like, you can drag and drop both MIDI and audio out of the plugin into your DAW. (I should point out that dragging and dropping didn’t always work as intended in Logic Pro, although it was flawless in Ableton Live. Pitch Innovations assures me they’re working to address this.)
Additionally, the sequencer allows you to save individual sequences in slots tied to MIDI keys, with fills available as well, for performance-style triggering.
At first, I was dubious about the sequencer, not sure of its usefulness, but once I started playing with it I found it to be really fun and a great way to get ideas going quickly. It really comes into its own when working with melodic information; since the plugin groups by note, you can whip up rhythmical sequences in a semi-random way that always sound good harmonically.
Although the sequencer is likely intended to be a simple idea generator, it would be great to see it fleshed out with a few modern parameters like ratchets and probability. As it is, it’s fun but limited. With a few extra functions, it could be incredible.
Final Thoughts
I really like Loop2Kit. It’s fast and fun, and the sequencer is inspiring. However, it still feels a little undercooked in some aspects. For example, the Sample Field. This is a 3-D visual representation of the sample groups that “plots every slice in space according to its sonic character,” according to the manual. You can click on a node to audition the sample… but that’s it. You can’t drag from the field onto a group pad, for example, or even zoom in. It’s nice to look at but feels underused.
Another area that could use some attention is the preset section. With only 32, it feels a little sparse. While they do a lovely job of showing what Loop2Kit is capable of (and they sound incredible), I found myself wanting more. The melodic section in particular is woefully underrepresented, with only four loops to play with. Given the price of Loop2Kit, this feels especially lean.
And that leads me to my last point: the price. Loop2Kit is regularly priced at $129 — pricey for what it can do, especially given the lack of bundled loops. For this amount of money, I would expect a few gigabytes of loops, at least.
Loop2KIt shows lots of promise. I hope that Pitch Innovations adds some more preset loops in the future, particularly melodic ones. The Sample Field is crying out for attention too. As it stands, however, it’s a great buy at the sale price. If you work with loops and love the idea of turning your breaks and toppers into kits with round robins, definitely check it out and grab it while it’s still on sale.
Adam Douglas is a music technology writer based in Japan. When he’s not writing for outlets like Attack Magazine, Gearnews and Music Radar, he can usually be found in his studio making ambient music or else out searching for the perfect bowl of ramen.
