Bopp & Steve

Space Effect

Sounds From Outer Space

With this module every sound is bigger on the inside and we can finally know how many angels fit on a pin-header. Between the input and the output your soundwave is shot through space and changes occur. Bopp & Steve let you in at different points to tweak and trim their spatial effects until you find the exact place in the universe you were looking for.

Bopp & Steve reverberates, diffuses, delays and shifts pitch of whatever you send into it. Based on a deconstructed audio path and intricate DSP these fabulous sounds come alive. We connected the virtual with physical reality. Making an instrument by giving you tangible parameters, connecting your fingers to bits floating in space.

PITCH
Pitch modes let you shift pitch chromatically (regular) three notes at time (chord) or detuned and unquantized (free). The chord mode is unique as far as we can tell. All modes are CV and Midi controllable. This is where we stuck all the angels on the pin-header. Following the note of your input a choir of harmonious notes will start sounding. Instant etherealness. With Pitch Point you select a point in the audio path where the pitch gets shifted. Pressing the Pitch Point LED button you will see little LEDs turn on (and off) at the wet input point, the diffuse point, the delay point, the tail point, wet output and dry output point or even on the feedback of the delay point. Transpose lets you set how far you transpose from -2 octaves to +2 octaves. Control gives you control over something else for every pitch mode. In Regular mode it lets you control inertia, in Chord mode it lets you control chord type and in Free mode it controls detune.

AUDIO PATH
The audio path in BOPP & STEVE is input – diffuse – delay – tail – output. Diffuse smears your sound over time which seems to change the shape of the space you are in and has its own Flavour setting you can tweak. Delay holds your sound over time which seems to make the space you are in bigger. In the Tail the diffuse and delay of your sound merge together and travels into infinity. A Main knob lets you set the wet/dry mix of all these spatial effects on your output. The Envelope of the dry audio path has its own tracker output that you can invert with the knob besides it. For the Delay effect you can choose between bouncing between left/right (pingpong), a supershort Karplus-Strong physical model (waveguide) or staccato repetition (multitap). You can tweak the Length, Feedback and Pattern of these delay modes. The tail can be smoothly tapering off (dense), coming and going in little grains (float) or choppy with space in between (sparse). You can tweak the Length, Chorality and Temprature of the different tails. Freeze holds the sound in the Delay and the Tail so they become infinite.

ORIGIN
The heritage of BOPP & STEVE starts with a reverb that Stijn has been working on since the 2000s. A version of it is in the Fenix IV Dual Delay as the Reverb mode with a “chunky shimmer and a phat detune”. Stijn has further deconstructed their Early Reflections into two parts (Delay and Diffuse) and created three types of Tail (Dense, Sparse, Float). The Floating tail is based on granular synthesis – that you will also find in our Brinta collaboration with Error Instruments. At Superbooth23 we presented a prototype. The hardware seemed settled and the software was mostly functional but not yet feature-complete and not all glooped together. Since then the insides have had a make-over as we changed to the new Raspberry Pi chip RP2350. Now that this chip is officially launched we move onwards with production and fully expect to have Bopp & Steve flying out the door in the fall.

Lovely write-up at GearNews  and Superbooth23 demo at SonicState Gearspace Gearjunkies LesSondiers

Specifications

Pricing

Sales price will be 440 EUR inc tax.