Six fragments of whatever you are playing, each looped at a
tempo a beat or two from its neighbour. They start together and then
disagree — sliding out of alignment and back, over minutes.
wayward v0.8.1 · audio_fx · requires schwung
What it is
Six loops, each keeping its own time
Record six short fragments from whatever is feeding the module. Tell
each one what tempo its loop should keep — 100, 101, 102, 103, 104,
105 — and press play. They begin on the same instant and then come
apart, because a loop at 101 is very slightly shorter than a loop at
100, and a hair of difference repeated a hundred times is a minute.
This is one of the oldest ideas in the music of the last seventy
years: independent periodic things, started together and left to
disagree. A hundred metronomes, two tape machines, an ensemble each
moving at its own pace. Wayward's contribution is only to put the
disagreement on a knob — see where it comes from.
Nothing is stretched to fit. If your fragment is shorter than
the beat it has been given, the rest of the beat is silence; if it is
longer, it is cut off where the loop restarts. That honesty is the
point — you hear a sound and then a rest, and it is the rests, falling
differently against one another, that make the drift audible at all.
Five pages. Main records and runs the thing. Shape tunes
how fast it comes apart. Loop edits one loop at a time. Mix
balances. Orbits tells you where everything is.
Rec → Play → drift → drift back
Setup
Load it into a chain slot
Wayward is in the Schwung module catalog, so the Module Store installs
and updates it for you: open move.local:7700, find Wayward,
install. Needs Schwung 1.0.0 or newer — not 0.12.x, because the Loop
page puts all six loops on one page with a selector and the part of Schwung
that makes that selector work only arrived in 1.0.0. If you would rather do
it by hand — for development, or with no network — the
repo
has the commands.
It never saves its settings. Wayward comes up at
its defaults every time, in every set — no autosave, nothing restored from a
saved project. Six takes and the tempi you tuned them to are a performance,
not a preset. The cost is that Schwung's User Presets and chain patches
cannot capture this module either.
It is audio_fx, chainable — drop it into any
Signal Chain fx slot. Nothing to configure: press REC 1, play
something, press it again, and loop 1 is running.
Recording starts where you do. The silence between
pressing REC and actually playing is trimmed off the front of every take
automatically, so you never have to dial it out by hand. A few milliseconds
are kept in front of the first sound, because an attack begins slightly
before it crosses the threshold and cutting flush to it shaves the edge off
every transient.
Screen — page 1 of 5
Main
The page you land on, and the only one you need while playing: six record
buttons and the transport. The six sit in a block on the left, in the same
arrangement they hold on Mix and Orbits, so loop 5 is always in the same
place under your hand. Click a control to see what it does.
REC 1–6
One button per loop, three stages, each press moving to the next. Press to start recording into that loop; press again to close the take, which starts looping immediately; press while it plays to overdub, layering onto what is already there without erasing it. The readout names what the next press will do — REC, STOP, DUB, PLAY.
You record into the loop whose button you press, so there is no routing to think about. A take can run up to thirty seconds; that is a safety net, not a target.
Since Schwung 1.0 a turn of the knob fires it as well as a click — a whole flick counts as one press.
PLAY
Starts all six at the same instant, from the top of their cycles. That shared instant is the thing the whole piece drifts away from, and the moment Orbits counts from. Press again to stop.
RSYN
Re-aligns every loop without stopping. Where PLAY starts the process, this restarts it mid-flight: whatever has drifted apart snaps back together and immediately begins sliding again. The most useful control on the page once things are running.
A button cannot show its own state. The Move draws a
trigger as a button and nothing else, so REC 3 reads
REC 3 whether or not loop 3 is recording. The words above appear
in the header strip while you hold the knob — and the Orbits page
shows all six states at once, which is why it exists.
Screen — page 2 of 5
Shape
How the ensemble is tuned: where it sits, how fast it comes apart, how
wide it spreads. Set once and left, which is why none of it is on Main.
BASE
The reference tempo, 40 to 200. On its own it does nothing — it is the number the other five loops are measured from.
SPRD
The instrument, really. Loop n runs at BASE + n × SPRD, so one knob decides how fast the whole piece comes apart.
At 0 all six are the same length and stay locked together forever — a rhythmic stack that never moves. At 1 they are 100 through 105 and take minutes to separate and return. At 5 or more the relationships get simple enough to hear as polyrhythm rather than drift.
Negative fans them downward instead. Turning it back to 0 is the largest gesture on the module: the drifting stops dead, wherever it had got to.
WIDEN
Fans the six across the stereo field — not a position but a spread. At 0 they are all centred. This matters more than it sounds: six loops phasing in mono turn to mud, and the same six spread across the image read as separate voices you can follow one at a time.
CLEAR
Erases all six takes and returns every setting to its default — but not at once. It fades the ensemble over fifteen seconds and wipes at the end.
The delay is the safety: there is no confirmation dialog on this screen, so instead the module announces what it is about to do in the only language it has. Press again to call it off and everything comes back at full level. The button reads KEEP while a clear is running, and Orbits counts the seconds down.
It is also simply the right shape for the last gesture of a piece.
Screen — page 3 of 5
Loop
One page for all six. LOOP chooses which one the other seven
controls are editing, and everything on the page changes to that loop when
you turn it. The top row is the take — which one, hear it, bound it. The
bottom row is the time it keeps.
LOOP
Which loop you are editing, 1 to 6. Four detents per loop, the same feel as every other selector on the device — a six-position control at one detent each would fly past its own range on a flick.
TRIG
Plays the window once, right now, ignoring the loop's tempo entirely. Purely for hearing what you caught. It works whether or not the ensemble is running.
START
Where the window begins inside the take, from its head at 0% to its tail at 100%. Nothing is erased — move it back and what you cut returns.
END
Not a second position but a length measured from START, and it goes both ways.
Centre is a window of nothing. Turn right and the window grows forward from START until it reaches the end of the take. Turn left and it grows backward from START — played in reverse, reaching the head of the take at the extreme.
So the two halves are mirror images about a silent centre, and the left half reaches material the right half never can. Put START at 100% and END hard left and you have the whole take, backwards.
BPM
This loop's own tempo, in whole numbers. Normally written by BASE and SPRD, but you can override any single loop here — five in a slow drift and one deliberately at half speed, say. Whole numbers matter: see the drift.
BEAT
How many beats long the loop is, 1 to 16. With BPM this gives the period: at 100 BPM, BEAT 4 is a loop of 2.4 seconds.
This is the knob that decides whether the piece breathes or flutters. At BEAT 1 every loop is a six-hundred-millisecond stutter; at BEAT 8 they are phrases. It also scales the whole arc — doubling BEAT doubles the time until everything comes back together.
FIT
What happens when the window does not equal the beat it has been given, which is nearly always. Three ways, each followed by a faded companion.
PAD plays the window and then goes quiet until the loop restarts — and cuts the window off early if it is longer than the beat. SPD plays the window faster or slower so it exactly fills the beat: no gap, and the pitch moves. RPT repeats the window as many times as it takes to fill.
PADF, SPDF and RPTF are the same three with a short fade at each end of the window, so the seam cannot click. The plain three keep the click on purpose — a hard splice is a percussive event, and tape music is full of them.
PHAS
Nudges this loop within its own cycle, half a cycle either way. Everything else here is set-and-wait; this is the hands-on one. Rather than waiting four minutes for loop 2 to drift into line with loop 1, you push it there.
It slides rather than jumps: the loop runs up to a quarter faster or slower until it arrives, so you hear it being pulled into place. That is what a performer physically does to a tape loop, and what Reich's players do to pull Piano Phase apart.
Screen — page 4 of 5
Mix
Every level in the module on one page: the six loops in their usual
block, and the two that are not loops in the right-hand column.
1–6
One fader per loop, up to 200%, defaulting to 80% so unity sits comfortably inside the travel. Six quiet takes summed can need lifting, and a loop pushed past unity into the soft clipper is a usable sound rather than an accident. Bringing loops in and out here is most of how the piece is performed.
DRY
How much of the live input passes straight through, defaulting to full. Not a dry/wet crossfade — the loops have their own levels — so at 100% you hear yourself playing and the loops. Turn it down to leave the ensemble playing alone.
OUT
The level of the whole ensemble against your live signal. Kept off the dry path deliberately: with nothing recorded, the module passes audio through untouched, bit for bit.
Screen — page 5 of 5
Orbits
The page that makes the drift legible. Six readouts, one per loop, saying
where each one is in its own cycle — and one number saying when they will all
be together again.
1–6
Where that loop is in its cycle, as a percentage. Six numbers climbing at six different rates is the whole instrument in one glance: identical when you press PLAY, scattered a minute later, together again at the end.
It also reports what the loop is doing, because a record button cannot: a dash for empty, REC while recording, S for a take sitting stopped, and O42 for a loop being overdubbed at 42% through.
ALIGN
Seconds until every loaded loop comes back into line, counting down. It is exact, not an estimate — see below. Past ten minutes it switches to minutes, so 12M means twelve.
It assumes you have not retuned anything since the last alignment. Turn a BPM or a BEAT and the loops no longer share the instant it counts from, so the figure jumps to describe the new arrangement; RSYN makes it true again.
While a CLEAR is running, this cell counts that down instead.
How the drift works
Whole numbers, and why they matter
A loop at 100 BPM and four beats long is 2.400 seconds. The same
loop at 101 is 2.376. Twenty-four milliseconds shorter — a flam, the
first time round. Ten times round it is a quarter of a second. Fifty
times round they are exactly opposed. And at a hundred times round, the
101 loop has completed exactly one extra lap and they are together
again.
That is the whole mechanism. Two tempi, p and q: in the
time the first plays p cycles the second plays q. Cancel
any common factor first — 100 against 105 is really 20 against 21, and
comes back in under a minute.
So the relationship between the numbers matters far more than
the numbers. 100 against 101 is a four-minute breath. 100 against 150 is
two-against-three — a groove, not a drift. And 100 against 100.37 is
neither: it never resolves into anything, which is why every tempo here
snaps to a whole number.
With six running, every pair has its own return time and they surface
and dissolve against each other continuously.
Six loops all at BEAT 4 come back together every four
minutes — at any whole tempi at all. Not just 100–105: any six. In four
minutes each loop completes exactly its own BPM count of cycles, so they all
arrive at once. Change one loop's BEAT and the figure moves: 3 against 4
needs twelve beats, so twelve minutes. ALIGN does this arithmetic for you.
Where it comes from
Six forefathers
None of this is new. Wayward is a small machine for doing something
composers have been doing by other means since the early sixties, and it is
worth knowing whose shoulders the knobs are standing on — not least because
each of them answered a question the module also has to answer.
Ligeti
Poème symphonique · 1962
A hundred wind-up metronomes, set to different tempi, started together and left to run down. It is the closest thing to Wayward that exists: many independent periodic sources, all begun on one instant, differing in nothing but rate, and a whole piece emerging from the arithmetic of their disagreement. Nobody performs it. You start it, and it happens.
Reich
It's Gonna Rain · 1965 · Come Out · 1966 · Piano Phase · 1967
Phasing: two copies of the same material at slightly different rates, sliding through every possible relationship and arriving back where they began. Reich's insight was that the transition is the piece, not the endpoints — which is why SPREAD is a knob you leave alone once it's set.
One difference worth keeping straight. Reich's tape drift came from two machines running at different speeds, which shifts pitch; Wayward drifts by giving loops different lengths, which doesn't. Same phenomenon, different cause. PHAS is the exception — it briefly runs a loop fast to pull it into place, which is Reich's method exactly, and literally what his players do to phase Piano Phase with their hands.
Riley
In C · 1964
Fifty-three fragments, any number of players, each moving through them at their own pace. The ensemble continuously falls out of and back into alignment, and no two performances are the same. Reich gives you the two-voice case; Riley gives you the crowd — which is the step from a pair of tape machines to six loops that each keep their own time.
Nancarrow
Studies for Player Piano · Nos. 37, 40, 41 · 1950s–60s
The tempo canons, written for player piano because no ensemble could play them. Study No. 37 runs twelve simultaneous tempos. A canon at 100:101:102 is exactly what SPREAD makes, composed by hand forty years earlier.
He also poses the question this module had to answer. Studies Nos. 40 and 41 use irrational tempo ratios, so the voices never realign and the piece has no return. Wayward snaps every tempo to a whole number to take the opposite side: the ensemble always comes home, and ALIGN tells you when.
Eno
Music for Airports · 1978
Tape loops cut to different lengths, so that sung notes recur at intervals which never coincide the same way twice. This is Wayward's mechanism precisely — and it is also where the silence comes from. Eno's loops are mostly rest: a note, then a long emptiness, and because the emptinesses differ the pattern never repeats. That is the argument for PAD being the default and for not stretching anything to fit.
Schaeffer
Étude aux chemins de fer · 1948
The locked groove: a disc cut so the needle could not escape, turning a recording into something that repeats forever. The loop as a musical object rather than a defect. Everything above depends on it, and so does every REC button here.
Ways to use it
What to actually do with it
A few starting points — all of them just combinations of the controls
above.
The canonical one
Record the same short phrase into all six, one after another. Leave SPREAD at 1 and press PLAY. They start as one thick voice and separate into six over the next few minutes, then gather back up. This is Come Out with five extra voices, and it is the thing the module was built to do.
Lock it, then let it go
Turn SPREAD to 0 before you press PLAY. All six loops are the same length, so they stay welded together — a rhythmic stack that never moves. Play over it for as long as you like, then turn SPREAD to 1 and listen to the stack come apart in real time. Turning it back to 0 freezes it wherever it got to.
One long, five short
Give five loops BEAT 1 and one loop BEAT 16. The five flutter against each other while the sixth takes sixteen times as long to say anything — a slow melody with a shimmering floor under it that never repeats the same way twice.
Rests as rhythm
Record six very short things — a stick, a click, a single note — and leave FIT on PAD with a long BEAT. Each loop is now one hit and a long silence, and because the silences are different lengths the pattern of hits never repeats. This is where padding stops being a compromise and becomes the point.
Three forwards, three back
Set START near the end on three of the loops and turn END hard left, so they play backwards. Reversed material drifting against forward material gives you something that sounds composed and is not.
Pull one into line by hand
Watch Orbits until two numbers are close, then use PHAS on one of them to slide it the rest of the way. You will hear the loop run fast for a moment as it catches up. Hold two in unison by hand while the other four keep drifting.
Overdub onto a moving target
Press REC on a loop that is already playing to start overdubbing, and add a second layer while it drifts. Because it is drifting, the new layer lands at a different point in its cycle relative to everything else — you are playing along with something that will not be there next time round.
Arrange around the four minutes
Leave every loop at BEAT 4 and watch ALIGN. The whole ensemble returns to unison every 240 seconds, exactly. Bring loops in and out with the faders so that the return lands on a full mix — a four-minute structure you did not have to write.
Let it end itself
Press CLEAR and leave it. Fifteen seconds of the whole thing receding, then silence and an empty module ready for the next one. It is the only control here that is also an ending.