14 HP · slowed, on the clock
Your mix comes out slowed and low, like a screwed tape, but it stays on your clock. SCREW slows whatever comes in the way a tape slows, pitch and time together, down to half speed. Slowed, it falls behind the rack, so after every beat, bar or four bars it cuts back to now, right on the downbeat: the drums drag through the bar and snap back on the one. CHOP repeats the last beat in time. BACK spins it back.
Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back.
example patches
The sound and the lights here are SCREW's own engine: the module's firmware, ported to the page and checked against it sample for sample. The drums, the bass, the pad and the voices are stand-ins for the rest of a rack.
SCREW is the big knob. Fully anticlockwise the sound passes untouched. Turned, it slows the sound the way a slowing tape does, pitch and time dropping together, down to half speed and an octave lower fully clockwise. Most of its travel is where slowed music lives, between about 1.5 and 9 semitones down; noon is three quarters speed, five semitones.
Inside, IN L and IN R are always being recorded, 44 seconds of tape in 8 MB of memory, and a read head plays them back at the slower speed, smoothly between samples. It can never get ahead of what's been recorded, so it never runs faster than real time.
Slowed, the sound falls behind the rack: at three quarters speed, a beat behind by the end of a bar. So on each catch SCREW cuts back to now, crossfaded over a few milliseconds, right on the clock's edge, and every window starts on the beat. What you hear in a window is its first part stretched to fill it: at three quarters speed and a bar's window, the bar's first three beats played across four. The last beat is never heard. Those missing tails are the chops.
CHOP is a button and a gate in. While it's held, SCREW loops the last REPEAT of what it played: the read head jumps back that far every REPEAT, so each repeat lasts exactly REPEAT and stays on the grid. Let go and it goes straight to where it would have been if you'd never touched it, the way a cut goes back to the copy of the record that kept playing.
BACK is a backspin, a button and a gate in, timed the same way. The read head runs backwards, fast at first and slowing to a stop over the rest of the beat (never less than half a beat), the sound falling away as it slows. On the next beat it catches up to now. On the last beat before a drop, it's the spin back and the one.
SCREW CV is a volt an octave on the tape's speed, added to the knob: −1 V takes it an octave further down, positive volts bring it back toward untouched, and it never goes faster than real time or slower than a quarter. A sequencer in SCREW CV plays the speed as a melody: each catch starts a bar at its own speed, so a voice through it follows the notes.
Patch only a voice into IN, keep the beat straight, and the voice drags against the drums and snaps back on every one. There's no dry and wet and no reverb on the panel: slowed and drenched is a reverb patched after it.
Fourteen HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. The art is a turntable from straight above in one hard light, gold on black: SCREW on the spindle, the label under the knob, two tonearms set down on the one record, its grooves drawn as gold lines.
Round SCREW are sixteen strobe dots, small windows of bare glass with a violet light behind each. The lit dot is where you are: at the top when nothing's slowed, drifting back a dot for every sixteenth of a bar you fall behind, a faint trail back to the top. On a catch it snaps back to the top. A window under CLOCK blinks the beat, and the caps of CHOP and BACK light blue while they're working.
Drag to look around. Lift the panel: the black baffle stays on the board, a cell for each window round SCREW's shaft and one under CLOCK, each with its LED at the foot. One RP2350 does it all, the tape in its 8 MB of memory.
SCREW is designed and its firmware builds. Nothing has been made, so the numbers here are the design's and the engine's, not measurements, and there's no date.