Free The Tone launches the Motion Loop, a pitch-shifting looper pedal

Free The Tone has launched the Motion Loop, a unique take on the loop pedal format. The pedal is loaded with a powerful DSP allowing for much stranger sounds than normal loopers allow.

The unit holds a bank of 128 user presets, along with 35 factory presets. The pedal features a small screen displaying the current preset, and its functionality varies greatly depending on how it’s programmed. For instance, the “simple loop” preset allows for a small section of your playing to repeat indefinitely for you to play over. In the “retrigger” preset, the pedal will loop the last phrase that you’ve played – effectively like a delay pedal with infinite repeats.

Loops can be run through a variety of effects including a pitch shift up or down by two octaves, a delay, high- and low-pass filters, reverse, random slicing and rearranging, and speed variation. There’s also some soft clipping for a more character than a perfect digital recording of your sound, as well as a unique waveform smoothing effect that ensures the loop’s start and end, as well as the seams of split samples, don’t sound artificial and jumpy.

An expression pedal input allows you to control any one of the Motion Loop’s parameters hands-free.

The pedal is quite an esoteric effect – and quite the departure from the vintage-styled overdrives and delays that make up most of Free The Tone’s lineup.

You can hear the pedal in action with the official demo below:

The pedal lists for $350 – find out more at freethetone.com. For more gear news, click here.