Category: Cutlasses Instruments

Happy New Year and Happy New Firmware! I hope you all had a lovely holiday. I found some free time to work on a new Gloop firmware (V1.1.0), which you can find, along with an updated manual and instructions on how to flash the firmware, here https://github.com/cutlasses/GloopResources Thanks to those of you that sent me suggestions, some of them have made their way into this update!

All the Gloop DIY kits have sold out, but more boards are currently winging their way to the UK as I type, so should be back in stock at Thonk soon. We still have a handful of built modules available at our shop https://www.cutlasses.co.uk/shop/ (currently shipping to UK and US, with EU coming soon) with a new batch planned for the near future.

Thanks to all of you who have bought Gloop, and thanks to those that have let me know how much you are enjoying them. Please do share any music or videos you make with it, I get a real thrill seeing how people are using it, and it helps me to improve the firmware too!

All the best for 2025!

Firmware 1.1.0 change log

Features:

• Split tape effect into
  • Wobble (WOBB) – applies a wow and flutter off simulating a broken tape player
  • Saturation (SAT) – applies tape saturation
  • Age (AGE) – adds tape hiss and random drop outs
• Added (equal power) panning per tape head (rather than A/B or A+B). Effects are still mono, so when panning tape heads you may want to disable effects. Old behaviour can still be achieved by having pan at 12 o’clock for A+B, and hard left, right for A/B
• Added CRSF dial (Cross Fade) to “Effects B” menu. Previously all cross-fades were 5ms. You can now vary the length of the cross fade from 5 milliseconds to 1 second. This results in smoother blends when a loop restarts. If the playhead is forced outside of the loop section (for instance when using the JMP modulation, or moving the loop position), the quick cross fade of 5ms is still applied.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed issue with tape effect wobble, was previously being applied incorrectly and didn’t sound right!
• Fixed an issue where, if you were modulating the position of the loop segment and this resulted in the play head being constantly restarted, the audio would sound distorted. This was because the playhead couldn’t cross fade quickly enough to the next position. Loop position modulation is now only applied every 50ms (20Hz). You can modulate at a faster rate, but it will be sub-sampled.
• Improved gain application of gain pots and A/B input mix (now properly logarithmic)
• Improved calibration menu

Gloop was released on Friday! Currently available at Thonk. I’ll be building a small batch soon, so those who aren’t interested in wielding a soldering iron should join the mailing list here to find out when the first batch is available. Don’t worry if you miss out, if the first batch sells well I’ll be doing a bigger one next. It’s really nice to see something that was only intended for my own use to make its way into the world! I hope those who use it enjoy it as much as I do!

Been a bit quiet on here recently, and barely played out live as all my free time has been dedicated to getting Gloop in a releasable state (the last 10% of a project really does take up 90% of the time!). For those interested in owning Gloop there will be exciting updates soon. Please join the mailing list if you want to know more about the plans for release.