Chase Bliss Audio Starts Kickstarter Campaign to Finance the Blooper

September 9, 2019 · 7 sources

Chase Bliss Audio opened a Kickstarter campaign to finance the Blooper, an experimental looper pedal the Minnesota maker first showed as a prototype at the Winter NAMM show in January 2019. MusicRadar reported that the campaign's basic price for a pedal was $499, and that the Blooper "looks to do to the looping station what their Tonal Recall pedal did for delay"¹.

The campaign passed its initial goal of $100,000 quickly. Guitar World reported the Kickstarter page had already reached over $216,000, with almost a month left to run², and Guitar.com put the figure at over $216,000 against the same $100,000 goal³.

The Blooper records 40 seconds of loop time at 48 kHz / 16 bit resolution, with an XMOS DSP processor inside handling the processing⁴. Its feature set, as the press reported at launch:

• Normal, additive and one-shot sampling modes³
• Unlimited overdubs, with eight layers of undo / redo²
• 32 save-able presets³
• Six loop modifiers: quantized and free time/speed changes, scrambler, trimmer, filter and dropper, available over two independent channels²
• A repeats knob for fading loops, or for using the Blooper like a tap-tempo delay³
• Stability control, with optional tape and warble effects on a loop²
• Full MIDI implementation³, CV clock sync and modulation control², and expression control over any parameter, individually or simultaneously¹

The prototype shown at NAMM carried knobs labeled Ramp, Cross, Drift, Stability, Mod A and Mod B, plus switches for EXP/CV, MIDI and a three-position 1,2,3 switch⁵. Guitar World noted the pedal had undergone rounds of revisions and modifications since that prototype, which Chase Bliss Audio documented in a YouTube series titled "Blooper Reel"².

Guitar.com, on the Blooper's launch³

Gearnews described the pedal as a premium-priced experimental looper from Chase Bliss Audio⁴. Following the campaign, the Blooper was expected for release in March 2020 at an RRP of USD 499⁶, and by December 10, 2019, Delicious Audio reported it was finished and shipping towards the end of December⁷.