Review: Ridgewalk by Aqeel Aadam Sound

Loopers have come a long way, baby.

Back in the olden musical days of skin drums, stone axes, and bellbottom jeans, creative looping depended on physical hardware. Producers worked with actual loops of tape, cut and spliced and chopped together, with (often non-non-destructive) effects applied. It was time-consuming, complicated and furiously fiddly.

These days, you can perform basic looping in just about any DAW. Define a loop, reverse it, slow it down, speed it up, apply effects – the essentials are covered and available at the click of a button or two. Which has opened the door for a veritable menagerie of advanced creative loopers with wild workflows, captivating capabilities, and fascinating functionality.

One such boutique looping playground is Ridgewalk by Aqeel Aadam Sound. Aadam’s take on the age-old looper is unique, flexible, musical, and possibly just a little bit mental. Interested in what this super looper can do? Let’s take a stroll.

Ridgewalk is a flexible, modular tool, and its depth goes as far as you care to explore.

Looping Beauty

If you’re the sort who’s inspired by pictures of forest foliage and majestic mountains, then prepare to be enchanted, because Ridgewalk has a graphical interface just for you.

That’s the quite attractive default screen shown when Ridgewalk is first opened. As moving and inspirational as the layered mountain ridges in the background may be, they’re also symbolic of one of the plugin’s nifty tricks. They’re also in the bit of the interface that will become interesting for other, more musical, reasons, as we’ll see.

Warm-up Walking

Let’s get a couple of basic things out of the way before we explore Ridgewalk’s unique nooks and crannies. At the top right of the interface is a gear icon; clicking this overlays an options menu onto the right half of the window.

This menu contains access to Presets, options to sync recording or playback to a DAW host, a toggle for Instant playback (more on this later), and adjustable global high-pass and low-pass filters. A second menu page, accessed via an arrow at bottom, provides additional settings for the number of Layers stored (when overdubbing, between five and ten layers), pitch quantization, a Tooltips toggle, and links to the printed and video manuals.

Back in the main interface, you’ll always find dials for Dry and Wet signal level at the far left and right centre of the plugin window, respectively. Now, let’s lace up our trainers and get a little more functional.

A Leg Up on Looping

Loopers of any sort have three basic functions at heart: recording loops, playing back loops, and doing various questionable and possibly indecent things to the audio in the loops while replaying.

Mostly, Ridgewalk’s parameters for each of those functions are found, in order, within the Buffer, Loopers and Traversal sections in the bottom half of the interface. Each section displays a couple of core options by default, but clicking on each section name reveals further exhilarating dials and settings to tweak.

Before we gallop headlong into those, it’s useful to understand the transport controls in the centre of the plugin. These four icons control the actual mechanics of loops being played back, deleted, and in one case, manipulated, so they’re worth a quick study.

(You may notice I didn’t mention the recording of loops. That’s because Ridgewalk supports three different modes for recording, the options for which are in the extended Buffer section. If we can assume in this next bit that we’ve managed to record a sick killer loop into Ridgewalk, I promise to cover the actual recording details next. Agreed? Stupendous.)

The first two playback icons, Play and Pause, are familiar and self-explanatory. The third, a sort of pushmi-pullyu double arrow, can be selected for reverse playback. And the final icon (X marks the spot) will delete the current buffer audio if held and pressed for one second. That covers the nuts and bolts of playing looped audio. As promised, let’s dig into Ridgewalk’s methods for looping it up in the first place.

Running with Ridges

Ridgewalk’s default recording mode, Auto recording, couldn’t be simpler. On the main interface – or in the Buffer expanded section, as seen below – adjust the Threshold to the desired level. When the first audio input reaches this threshold, recording will begin. There’s also Classic Recording, which provides a clickable Record button, if you prefer to kick off the process manually (and have “Recording syncing” turned off in the options). Finally, File import allows you to select or drag and drop any audio file into the buffer directly.

Ridgewalk will overdub audio into a buffer for as long as the input is playing, retaining copies of the most recent layers as the audio morphs over time. The size of the buffer is determined by the control next to Threshold in the Buffer section, allowing either Size (between one and sixty seconds) or Synced size increments (one beat to sixteen bars).

The overdubbing behavior is controlled with the next Buffer knob, with some clever subtleties. In Feedback mode, a percentage of the volume of the original buffer is retained, so if the second buffer pass isn’t identical, ghosts of the first recording remain. The Sidechain option carries this idea further, with overdubbed audio compressing the original by a ratio between 1:1 and 1:10, the better for complex and sculpted layering between quiet bits of each pass. The last mode, No overdub, preserves the original buffer entirely, if you’re one of those “one take is all I need” virtuosos.

The final dial in the Buffer section, Layer, allows for selection of a previous iteration of the buffer. If the most recent pass wasn’t up to snuff, you can scroll back in time to recover a version you prefer. As noted above, Ridgewalk will retain between five and ten buffer layers, adjustable via the control in the options menu.

On the main interface, the dial next to Threshold in the Buffer section, Hold time, is actually more of a playback control. It determines “how long playback will occur before pausing automatically” (as per the handy plugin tooltips). This can be set from one-tenth of a second up to sixty seconds, or “Infinite” (which is to say, constant playback) at the highest setting.

Walk It Back Now

That segues nicely into the Loopers section, which controls various aspects of buffer playback. Size and Blur are surfaced on the main interface, but the detailed Loopers options begin with Amount, where up to seven semi-independent playback loopers can be specified. Next is Pitch, with potential adjustment of up to two octaves in either direction.

As with recording, looper playback length can be set as Size (from one-hundredth of a second to nearly three seconds) or Synced size (from a sixty-fourth note to whole). The Blur control is great for developing shimmery soundscapes — up to fifty percent, it controls crossfade level between loops; above that, it adds a reverb of increasing size and depth.

The Loopers Drift knob adds a randomness factor to each looper’s size and position. The final control in this section allows dialing in a percentage of Random volume (chance of playback volume variation) or Random skip (chance of intermittent playback muting).

That leaves just the Traversal section, with finer controls over playback behaviour and mangling. The most important of these are surfaced on the main interface: Movement and Time. Movement has several options; Forward, Backward, and Ping-Pong are fairly straightforward, and Wander lets the looper(s) roam randomly.

Setting movement to External allows for automation or modulation in the DAW, and Mouse click, as illustrated below, lets you manually click on a spot (indicated by the small circle) in the buffer among the ridges to guide the playhead (indicated by the small red dot on the white looper playback line) to the preferred location.

The Traversal Speed setting is context-dependent, with settings for percentage of playback speed in Mouse click or External modes, and Time (from one-tenth to sixty seconds) or Synced Time (from one beat to thirty-two bars) for all others. The remaining Traversal parameters control Fade time (if playback is not set to Infinite), level of Spread between loopers in the buffer (if multiple loopers are selected), and Start position and End position, to limit loopers to a specific range within the current buffer.

A Super-Duper Looper

Ridgewalk does a strikingly good job of balancing flexibility with simplicity. The interface isn’t littered with dozens of controls and buttons – but if you want to try some fairly radical options, they’re just a click or two away. The plugin also doesn’t corral you into one method of working. Play live, use existing loops, overdub or don’t, use the provided transport controls or lean on your DAW’s; it’s all the same to Ridgewalk and you’re encouraged to settle into workflows you prefer.

Some of the “easy” things most loopers (or DAWs) can do aren’t as absolutely straightforward here. Replaying a buffer at half-speed, for instance, would involve setting the time (or synced time) for playback in the Traversal section at double the value for the buffer length in the Buffer section, with a few other knobs adjusted so as not to repitch, randomise or jitter up the results.

The logic becomes clear (and old hat) very quickly, though. Having various aspects of buffer capture, playback rate, looper size, and more separated and independently configurable opens wide (ridge-lined?) vistas of possibility, compared to static choices like “double time”, “reversed” or “half speed”.

Past the flexible tweakability, some of the subtlety and uniqueness that can be squeezed out of Ridgewalk is due to the clever inclusion of multiple (and configurable) recording buffer layers and playback loopers. Those options allow aspects of space, patterning, variety, and creativity not found in “standard” single-in / single-out loopers. If anything, at least for the playback heads, even more flexibility could be fun. Adjusting each independently with size, direction, and pitch might be “a Ridge too far”. But it might pan out in some creative contexts and lead to experiments even farther afield.

In short, Ridgewalk is a looper’s looper. It’s capable of the basics, but also near-infinite variations of those basics, with just a handful of controls. It can be quite musical and predictable, with judicious selections of a few important settings (which can then be tweaked or automated to generate constellations of related loops). It’s equally at ease in subtly scrambling beats, stretching out soundscapes, or glitching up… well, just about anything, with the right settings dialed in. Spend a bit of time with Ridgewalk, and the lovely mountains in the interface won’t be the only beautiful thing coming out of the experience.

Learn more about Ridgewalk at Aqeel Aadam Sound.