Modern Tools - Copicat

The Ashtray - a case study

At its core, The Ashtray by This Window is built around a ¼" tape loop first created in 1981—a fragile analogue fragment re‑entered, re‑worked, and expanded in 2026. The result is a piece that carries two timelines at once: the raw, handmade immediacy of the original loop and the colder, more sculpted sensibility of its modern augmentation. It sits somewhere between art project and sci‑fi horror vignette—a lost soundtrack cue found on a degraded VHS, half‑erased by time. The loop’s mechanical churn becomes a pulse; the added layers smear into a synthetic fog. There’s tension, restraint, and a faint sense that the machinery itself is breathing.

Loops used to be fragments of accidents—tape cut too short, a sampler mis‑triggering, a machine playing slightly off its own rhythm. Even when you tried to be precise, the gear had its own opinions. It would saturate, smear, drift, and occasionally betray you. That instability wasn’t a flaw; it was part of the music’s personality. The loop was “alive” because it didn’t fully agree with the plan.

My favourite tool...

The Watkins Copicat, introduced in 1958 by Charlie Watkins of WEM (Watkins Electric Music), was one of the earliest and most influential tape echo units. It worked by running a continuous loop of magnetic tape across multiple playback heads, each positioned at different intervals. When a signal—typically from an electric guitar—was recorded onto the tape, these heads replayed it with slight delays, creating the signature echo and repeat effects. Compact, reliable and affordable, the Copicat became a staple for musicians throughout the 1960s and 1970s, shaping the sound of early rock, pop, and experimental music. I used the tapes to make loops on my Revox PR99.

Today’s digital loops arrive pre‑balanced, pre‑compressed, pre‑approved. They’re frictionless—drag, drop, done. And when something is frictionless, it rarely creates friction in the artistic sense: the collisions of intention and reality that lead to discovery.

A loop that already knows its place doesn’t need you. It doesn’t ask anything of you. It doesn’t misbehave. It simply repeats, obediently, until the track is finished. At first, that sounds like productivity. Eventually it starts to feel like substitution. You’re not composing from impulse anymore—you’re selecting from a shelf.

The danger isn’t that loops are “bad.” It’s that reliance on them can train your ear and your hands to stop looking for the unexpected. Instead of asking, “What happens if…?” you begin to ask, “Which version matches the vibe?” And those questions produce different kinds of music.

MIDI: The Grid That Never Sleeps

MIDI was once a miracle—machines talking to machines, notes arriving like thoughts, editable after the fact. It changed everything by making performance reprogrammable. You could play once and sculpt forever.

But MIDI’s superpower—precision—has a way of turning into a habit. It becomes a grid that quietly dictates the behaviour of almost every instrument in the room. Velocity curves smooth out the drama. Quantisation straightens the personality. Scale snapping prevents you from hitting the wrong note, but it also prevents you from discovering the right “wrong” note—the one that doesn’t belong by theory yet somehow lands like fate.

In the old workflow, your choices had consequences. In the new workflow, consequences are optional. And when consequences are optional, the urgency that shapes good art can start to fade.

Beats That Behave Too Well

Drum machines used to be stubborn little boxes. They were rhythmic, but they demanded attention. You had to coax them, fight them, persuade them to swing in a way that felt human. Even the best machines couldn’t perfectly simulate the messy micro‑timing and emotional push of a drummer in a room. The imperfections were audible, and they gave rhythm something organic to hold onto.

Now every DAW offers “humanisation” as a menu option, as if humanity is just another parameter you can toggle. Micro‑shifts appear where the software thinks you want them. Swing gets applied as a percentage rather than a performance. Even when it sounds “human,” it often feels statistically human—convincing but not unpredictable.

Modern beats are perfect in the way a showroom floor is perfect. They shine. They line up. They never trip. And while that can be exciting, perfection can also flatten tension. Tension is what makes listeners lean forward. It’s what creates anticipation—small delays, confident pushes, sudden hesitations. The groove isn’t just timing; it’s intention.

When beats behave too well, you lose the edge where the music catches the listener off guard—the sparks that come from the performer (or the machine) refusing to be entirely predictable.

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