I love Alan Watts, he’s probably my favorite person to listen to say anything…
When I refer to warping I mean affecting the looped audio using slices to rearrange the playback order, changing rate and pitch of playback, adding fx, and all that…
I usually use a pickup to capture a loop and on the same pattern I have a flex machine with the pickups recorder buffer loaded. The flex track is where the slicing and things happen, but I do not record first and then go to the flex and change things, I set up the flex before I even record.
Say I recorded a drum loop:
-kick hat snare hat kick hat snare hat
By rerranging the start points of the loop on the flex track I could make the loop play as:
-hat hat snare hat kick kick snare hat
With further tweaking I can have the first hat play backwards, the second hat be pitch shifted and have reverb applied, the kicks I could decrease the decay, and the snares played at half speed… For example… All done with trigs and plocks on the flex track…
To use this all I do is record into the pickup. There’s no need to switch patterns, parts, save the sample, load the sample somewhere, or anything. All of the programming was done before anything was ever recorded. As I record into the pickup the flex begins playing the “warped” remix as the pickup recording in real time…
I hit record on the pickup to record -kick hat snare hat kick hat snare hat, and the flex plays back -hat hat snare hat kick kick snare hat with all the rate/pitch/fx applied. Using scenes it’s easy to have the flex muted as the recording is made but it’s already there waiting to be mixed in with the fader. It’s possible to have more than one of these flex remixes using the same buffer, there could be 7 different ones all remixing the pickup track and all of them happen instantaneously when recording…
Now that this is setup you can record different loops into the pickup and they will have the remix applied, you can see how it affects a different drum loop, or a melodic passage, or vocals, or whatever. There’s many flex remixes you can make that work with a broad range of material, this is the fun part I was talking about being excited to hear what might come out of my flex remixes when recording different material into them…
With careful programming you can make the remixes very rhythmic and musically fitting, you can even program pitch shifts accordingly to play back harmonies to your passages… If using a recorder trig continuously sampling you can have an ever evolving constant remix that harmonizes with what your playing and keeps evolving as you go…
One sneaky thing with slices/start point remixes and pitch/rate adjustments is that it’s possible when making sequences to sequence a part of the recorder buffer that hasn’t been recorded yet. Like above where I wanted to play the hat first in the flex remix. When recording the loop the kick comes first on step one, the hats not until later. If my flex is trying to play a hat on step one(let’s say hat is on start point 32 of loop) it won’t be able to play as the buffer is being recorded as it hasn’t happened yet. When the recording is finished it will play in its entirety as there’s actually something recorded to play back… If using a constant recorder trig this has to be thought about and programmed accordingly to not target anything that hasn’t been recorded yet, otherwise playback will have dropouts… As long as the flex is trying to play a start point of the buffer that is either the current one or earlier in the recording, it will play as its being recorded…
Rate and pitch shift changes can also require some processing time and might not play back during recording unless programmed accordingly…
This is just the beginning. Consider the midi tracks playing a synth that is being continuously remixed, with different track lengths between playback and recording, using selected notes on midi track and careful pitch shifts on flex so it is always harmonizing with itself, and in constant evolution. Scenes can do crazy things here, conditional trigs, etc… Next up the fathomless rabbit hole of resampling the above to a second remix of the remix, up to another 6 levels deep. 
Chew on the above for awhile(food for th 
) At some point maybe I’ll make a thread with a step by step example outlining how to make a basic loop + flex warp scenario… 