Qu-Bit Stardust

There’s a magic to tape. Not just the ‘ooh, that sounds lovely’ magic of tape saturation, but the compositional magic of Frippertronics or sound-on-sound looping. The magic of interacting with a machine and never being entirely sure what’s going to happen next. There are worlds of experimentation to explore with tape, but as anyone who has mucked about with the magnetic brown stuff will know, it’s not without its drawbacks: price, maintenance, capacitors going pop, thousands of feet of the stuff unexpectedly spooling onto the floor...

So imagine all of that potential for sound exploration contained within one convenient Eurorack module, all controllable by CV. Well, many people have, perhaps most notably Make Noise, but the latest device to take up the challenge of ‘tape without tape’ is the Stardust, which Qu‑Bit describe as a ‘cosmic tape looper’. The cosmic part is open to interpretation, but the tape looper part is fairly straightforward, and straightforward is what the Stardust is all about.

That’s not to say it can’t produce complex results — complex and surprising results — but that Qu‑Bit have done their best to make things simpler. Not just simpler than working with tape — that could hardly be more complicated — but simpler than other tape‑inspired modules. To this end the front‑panel functions and controls are clearly labelled and easy to understand. The only slightly cryptic element is the cosmos graphic that surrounds the central Varispeed encoder, the changing colours of which denote different states — useful if you can manage to remember what the colours mean. Everything else is fairly self explanatory. There are stereo inputs with level control, and stereo outputs with a wet/dry control; buttons for record, play, reset and reverse; loop start and size knobs... All of which do what you would expect. Slightly less expected, the Slice control not only slices the loop into increasing divisions as you turn it, but also randomly skips between slices (or splices in Stardust parlance); and Skip doesn’t skip between slices as you might...