Reaper feedback FX routing

I love working with feedback – in analog, acoustic and the digital domain - and its unpredictable nature and the often unplanned and surprising moments that occur.

This is a short video on digital feedback routing which can be set up in Reaper; a translation of my previous experiments with a similar approach with a reel to reel tape deck, which in turn was heavily inspired by the self-generating and self-adjusting feedback system works of Jaap Vink and Roland Kayn. Highly recommended listening.

A feedback loop consisting of various plugins such as reverb, filters, frequency shifting, ring modulation, etc. With this approach, subtle nuances and small nudges can send the entire system in an unintended direction.

In this video I am just allowing the system to feed back in small automation blocks, which allows me to quite quickly generate a lot of variation by letting the system run its course.
Many plugin parameters has got either amplitude-controlled modulation or LFOs applied, to make sure the system doesn’t necessarily lock into one paritular state in every block and becomes more reactive.

The results are usually quite lively and gestural, especially if you hit some sweetspots with the amplitude-controlled parameters. This setup can be used for both atmospheric soundscapes and generating single audio assets.

Note: Watch out for runaway frequencies and violent levels if you want to do this yourself - and always use some sort of limiting. I’ve had good use of spectral resonance suppressors for this, but it will obviously add some (more) latency, which might or might not be suitable, as it introduces a delay in the feedback loop. Same goes for your system’s buffer size settings. Write me if you have any questions.

Thanks for listening.