Free The Tone Delivers Smart Stereo Motion Loop Sample-Repeater-Shifter

Free The Tone’s Brand New Motion Loop Pitch Shiftable Short Looper reminds me of a sort of cross between a DigiTech Whammy Ricochet and Chase Bliss Audio Mood. At its core this seems to be very much a Micro-Looper style of pedal with extended Parameter control.

Essentially the pedal can sample up to 4 Seconds of sound - which you then manipulate in various ways. There are 4 main effects sections as such - Pitch, Loop Signal, Waveform and Delay.

The Pitch shifter gives you 1 or 2 octaves in either direction - with additional timing controls. Loop Signal allows you to increase or decrease loop signal level on each repeat. Then for Waveform we can adjust the shape of the rising waveform of the sampled sound - 4 options, plus Soft Clipping. And Finally, we can manipulate the signal as a delay - with 1, 1/2, 1/4, .1/8 and 1/8 divisions in effect.

What makes this pedal especially great is the stereo support it provides - with TRS cable support on the single input, and then full L/R Stereo Output.

This is not an exact overlap or substitute for say the EHX Pitchfork or DigiTech Whammy Ricochet - but that’s certainly the slot I would mostly deploy this on - #2 - which would obviously forego stereo functionality. While I could also deploy in on slot #40 in rotation with the Boss RC-10R.

Another significant feature is that you can alternate between 2 Presets on the right-hand footswitch, but then with the Parameter control - you can access up to 128!

I love the inclusion of a screen here - which certainly helps with some of the underlying complexity - although I do wonder why the screen could not have been a little larger. Guitar Pedals seem to almost always have weirdly too small screens, with too low a resolution - something Boss falls foul of every now and again. I certainly feel that is one aspect that could be improved - while it’s always nice to have some form of screen - unless that in itself adds in a whole lot more complexity.

I feel that there are all kinds of clever manipulations capable within this pedal - but it will involve a significant exercise of discovery to unravel some of those bonuses - while the pedal handily does come with a large number of factory presets too - in order to help you along in the right direction.

This is a highly innovative pedal which brings together a number of smart methodologies within the one unit - and should be of interest for those who dabble with pedals like the Chase Bliss Audio Mood - as this is somewhat in a similar ballpark.

Most definitely an intriguing pedal for me - and it does go in on my wishlist - I’ve yet to determine its priority though.

What do you guys think? Is this something you can see yourselves using?