Pattern Keeper.

Record. Play. Get weird.

Our friend Lucas Naylor (who sings and plays in Carly Cosgrove) came to me with a problem. He needed a looper that could keep up with him live. Simple to record, simple to overdub, simple to delete. But every time he'd try a looper on the market, he'd end up playing Bop It instead of playing music. Twist it. Turn it. Double tap and hold. It was a lot of pedal management and not really a lot of creating. You could say it was a whole lot of fuss for nothing.

I seen that need and started cooking up a solution for Lucas. And somewhere along the way, what started as "let's simplify the interface" turned into something we didn't expect. It literally turned into a whole new way to think about looping while still keeping to its core of simplicity first. The more intuitive we made the experience, the more room there was to go somewhere you'd never been before.

Pattern Keeper really isn't just a looper. It's a creative tool built for the musician who wants to explore and live in the moment.

Who's it for?

The live musician who wants to build wild, evolving soundscapes without chaining a massive ridiculous rig together. It's for the one who's frustrated that most loopers put them in a box. It's for the musician who wants to create, not manage.

What's it for?

Stereo looping with tape-like pitch shifting, synth-inspired filtering, and reverse playback. Pattern Keeper transforms simple melodies into complex and evolving textures layer by layer, in real time.

Pattern Keeper — A tribute to the traditional art of Blackfeet beadwork.

In Blackfeet culture, beadwork is storytelling. Each bead is placed one at a time, stacked and layered with intention, building toward something larger than any single piece could be. It's not a quick process. It's a craft. And the craft isn't in threading a single bead. The craft is in how you assemble the beads to create the full picture. How you decide which colors go next to each other. How the layers come together to tell the full story.

That's what changed how we saw looping. Most loopers treat it like record and play, so black and white. You know? You put something in and get something back. Black and white. But beadwork isn't black and white. It's layered, it's intentional, it's open-ended. We wanted looping to feel that way too. Not a looper that just repeats but instead, a looper that builds.

So we started thinking about looping the way our ancestors approached beadwork. The musician's job is to layer. Our job was to make sure the interface never got in the way of that. Recording and overdubbing needed to be as simple as threading a bead. What you do with those layers, that's left for your creativity.

The Blackfeet design tradition that shaped Pattern Keeper's look is also worth understanding here. Blackfeet beadwork pulls from two distinct Native traditions. The geometric style of the Southwest and the realistic imagery of the Northeast. That combination created something unique. Generally geometric representations of natural and cultural symbols. Pattern Keeper carries that lineage.

Dots that build into arrows. Arrows that build into a story.

Pattern Keeper's enclosure features individual dots with each one representing a single bead. Look at them together and they form three arrows, layered one after another, each colored differently. The arrows build on each other the same way your loops do. One layer starts it. The next changes it. The one after that takes it somewhere new.

The evolving colors in the design reflect what Pattern Keeper actually does to your sound. As you shift pitch, reverse playback, and sweep the filter, your loops transform as the full pattern reveals itself bead by bead. Simple elements. Layered with intention. Something bigger than any single piece. That's the magic and philosophy of Pattern Keeper.

Most loopers put you in a box. Pattern Keeper opens the floor to creating.

We had one main beef with the looper market. Record and play. Sounds wild but I mean it felt so cold and tbh, boring. Same loop, same direction, same boring tone.

Pattern Keeper was built to change that. We took the analog approach to digital looping. Controls like tape-inspired pitch manipulation, synthy fourth-order filtering pulled straight from our Niisoo topology, reverse playback that flips your melodies into something completely new just like reversing a tape. You're really not just repeating what you played. You're building something that didn't exist before you pressed record. It's WILD.

Here's some of the controls that you get to cook with.

Output volume. Controls your output up to unity. It lets you dial Pattern Keeper in to match the exact volume situation you're in. Light and ambient? Roll it back. Full send? Crank it. On the note of volumes, it's important to note that each overdub you add incorporates a decay to the previous overdubs which allow for this natural stacking of overdubs so things don't sound crowded. You can think of this as an automatic decay.

One thing worth knowing is that you can't delete individual overdubs in Pattern Keeper. That's not something we missed but instead it's intentional. Inspired by the days of recording on tape where what you get is what you get, it puts your mind in a completely different creative space. You get something that's raw, natural, committed. And honestly? That's where true inspiration and creativity comes from.

Input volume. Your analog dry signal stays analog and is NEVER processed digitally. The input control lets you match your playing level to fit the feel of your loop. If you ever laid a loop down and then kicked on a fuzz to layer on top, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's too dang hot and that's where input volume comes into play. Input volume fixes that on the fly. Instant mixing, no adjusting volumes on other pedals.

Pitch. Tape-like pitch shifting from one octave down to one full octave up, with a center detent that snaps back to unity. The pitch shifting literally moves like tape and captures all the in-between pitchy goodness and weird intervals. Oh and octave down gives you this massive, ambient wall of sound while octave up starts getting glitchy and repeating in ways that feel almost broken in the best possible way. And because the speed changes with your pitch adjustments, every position feels different.

Filter. Fourth-order filter on the master output, modeled after the same topology as our Niisoo. Left of center is low-pass which is like throwing a blanket over your tone, it's warm and rolled off. Right of center is high-pass which will give you these telephone lo-fi sounds. Center detent snaps back to no filter instantly. Pair this with the pitch control and you've got synth-like sweeping that really takes your loops into some spicy territory.

Stop mode. One of our biggest decisions was giving stop its own switch. Most loopers cram too much into a single footswitch (record, play, stop, overdub, all on the same button depending on how many times you tap it). We split it out. Record, play, and delete live on one switch. Stop and restart live on another. That partition is intentional. You manage the loop with one foot and stay focused on creating with the other.

Trigger mode. Sampling is one of the most fun things you can do with a looper. Take something you've recorded and drop it rhythmically into whatever you're cooking up. And trigger mode will do exactly that. Jump to the beginning of your loop on command and fit it into whatever is happening around you. Crazy simple.

Reverse and forward playback. You can record and overdub in either direction and you can switch between them during a session. Forward is your classic loop. Reverse was a must-have for me personally. I've been a huge John Frusciante fan since his solo records, where reverse melodies became a core part of the emotional pull of the song. Adding reverse to Pattern Keeper was more about adding a feeling rather than just a function. And because you can overdub in both directions, the textures you end up with are pretty much endless.

Expression control. Map any expression pedal or switch to any control except the analog input and you can map multiple controls together at the same time. My personal go-to is mapping filter and pitch to the same expression pedal. Heel down: normal playback. Toe down: sounds like a tape track fading out into a warped, lo-fi thing. You can remap anytime mid-session as well.

Looping made fun.

The biggest engineering decision we made with Pattern Keeper was the one that sounds the simplest. We didn't allow double-tap and hold functions to perform general looping functions. Ever.

That might sound like we took something away but nah. We didn't. We gave something back (your sanity).

Most loopers require you to learn a whole system of button combinations just to use basic functions. Double tap to stop. Hold to delete. Tap twice fast and hold for reverse. I mean what the heck are we doing here? You're not playing, you're managing. And every second you spend remembering button combinations is a second you're not in the music. Like for real.

We decided from day one: one switch does one thing. Record, overdub, and delete on one switch. Stop and restart on another. That's it. The musician decides how complex to get with their layers. The pedal just stays out of the way so you can create.

A big thank you.

Pattern Keeper wouldn't exist without the inspiration that runs through everything we do at NativeAudio. We have nothing but the concept of Blackfeet traditional beadwork. It's the careful, creative approach to adding each layer, one by one, to build a full story. This approach is genuinely what this pedal is about. Not as a metaphor but really it's Pattern Keeper's philosophy. It's an honor to take the time to appreciate this traditional craft through what Pattern Keeper does and what it gives musicians the ability to create. We couldn't have built this without our Blackfeet roots.

Much love.

-Mike Trombley, Founder

Let's make some noise!

Now that we've explored the possible, let's go and create the impossible.