Count To Five

Count to five is a unique delay/sampler that offers many sonic possibilities. These are best shown by demonstration in the videos above below. The video above was made by Knobs. They will be back in production soon, please sign up for the mailing list in the top right corner to be notified!

This is an expansion on my GB24 pedal made sometime last year. It is a lot more than just an update to the original pedal though so here is a breakdown of the similarities and differences. There is now a MODE switch that picks between 3 different patches.

Mode 1:
This is very similar in concept to the original GB24 except that now you can use the EXP switch to select which parameter the expression pedal controls. You can assign it to the read head direction, buffer length or feedback. The expression pedal cannot be used to control the mix unfortunately.

Also a bunch of people wished the direction/speed control could be quantized to musical intervals. Now you can achieve this by pressing the second foot switch and moving the DIR 1 knob. You can pick between 3 settings:
    1) No quantization (freedom baby, go from litereally a stand still to double speed forward or backward, just like the original, for those familiar)
    2) Quantization resulting in chromatic intervals across +/- 1 octave forward or backwards
    3) Quantization to only perfect fifths and octaves across +/- 1 octave forward or backwards


Mode 2:
This patch allows you to sample a clip and then play it back in slices. You can record a clip by holding down the secondary footswitch and then releasing it when done. As soon as you let go playback starts according to the pot settings. DIR 1 controls the playback speed/direction, LEN S (LEngth of Slice) controls how long of a snippet/grain to play and RAND (RANDom) controls the variability of the slice position. So for example with RAND turned all the way down the slice always starts at the beginning of the recorded sound, but as you increase RAND the start of the slice is picked more randomly from the originally recorded clip.

Once a clip is recorded you can either record another clip while the first one is still playing by holding down the secondary footswitch OR you can reset the record buffer by tapping the secondary footswitch. If the pedal is bypassed while a sample is playing, it will still be playing when you re-engage the pedal.

The EXP switch can again be used to pick which control the expression pedal replaces (DIR 1, LEN S, RAND).

Mode 3:
This patch also allows you to sample a clip for looping. You can do so by holding down the secondary footswitch. When you release the footswitch playback begins immediately. The controls for this mode are DIR 1, DIR 2 and DIR 3. Essentially now there are 3 playback heads running on the same clip. You can independently control the direction/speed of each one. In this mode the EXP switch functions quite differently compared to the other modes. Since all knobs have a similar function, the expression pedal always replaces the DIR 1 knob. The EXP switch is then used to control how many read heads are actually active. You can toggle between 1,2 and 3 active heads which allows some nice dynamics/cool layering.

Holding the secondary stomp down again while your clip is playing will overdub onto the original clip. Tapping the secondary switch will stop playback and reset the clip buffer.

Other features:
The pedal has a mini-usb jack which is accessible by removing the back plate. The goal of this is to allow user end firm-ware upgrades/custom code deliveries etc. There is however no usb functionality under normal use so don't get tooo excited.

In general the sound quality is much improved over the original gb24 and the sampling/loop time is equal, about 8 seconds. However, in the second patch only 4 seconds of sampling time can be used per sample, this allows a new sample to be recorded while the old one is still playing back. Check out the user demos in the playlist below for more sound samples.