Relooper: Real-Time Groove and Remix Effect Plugin by United Plugins

The core of Relooper is its groove engine. It keeps a buffer of the incoming audio and replays slices of it at varying speeds, directions and lengths. United Plugins describes the output as anything from stuttering and repeating patterns to rearranged and reversed material.

Because the processing happens in real time, there is no need to load a sample library or audition files. You feed it a loop and the grooves are generated from that material, which makes it a quick way to find variations of a part you already have.

Each generated layer can be morphed into one of 64 profiles, which take on the character of other sounds, including resonators, 3D space profiles and drum types such as kick, snare, hats and percussion. MIDI notes can also be sent to the plugin to resynthesize the grooves.

A set of 64 effects covers distortion, reverb, sound effects, modulation, sweeping filters, compressors, gates, transient shapers and EQ. Motion is handled by 120 level modulation modes, which can silence the groove except at the end of bars for auto-fills, apply trance-gate style rhythms or create sidechain-style pumping, along with a range of LFO shapes.

Relooper includes smart bypass and intelligent sleep on silence, so it stays out of the way when there is no input. Processing is described as 64-bit at any sampling rate, and United Plugins offers free-for-life updates.

The plugin is a good fit for reworking an existing sample library, adding rhythmic movement to a static loop or generating fills without programming them by hand.