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RE: Using computers as a Live Looper - software alternatives



I'm new to new looping myself, and am oriented towards software because I work as a software developer, and not necessarily because it's better for looping. I agree with all the previously mentioned limits of Ableton Live. That said, I like the Live paradigm because I'm oriented mostly towards looping more traditional music elements that I play/record live along with live percussion and vocals. Ableton's clip editing features are nice (for me at least) to have visible in an intuitive way. ie you can see measure/beat counts and easily change loop durations and various envelopes on the fly, while a loop is playing. You can also have loops fire without syncing to the project tempo/beat. Another nice feature is the "scene" concept, in which multiple loops are designated to start/stop at the same time. It's very easy to arrange scenes on the fly and keep only some loops going from scene to scene while you add new ones.
 
Ableton's got good realtime time-stretching (ie pitch invariant) which is great for what I'm working on. I don't know one way or the other if hardware loopers/repeaters do time-stretching.
 
I just found out about a cool VST slicing/re-mixing plug-in that's really great: SupaTrigga (http://www.smartelectronix.com/~bram/) It slices up a loop and gives you several parameters for automatically remixing the loop on the fly with random variations. It'll reverse slices, silence them, slow them down, etc. Great with Ableton.
 
You can simulate overdubbing by switching and recording on different tracks in Ableton live, although the midi controller mappings are not currently designed efficiently for this. The important functions for live looping on each track, namely arm/disarm, trigger/launch, stop and track-select, all have to be set _independently_ for each track. So, you'd need a separate midi controll event for each track's arm/disarm, etc. For working with 10 tracks, you need at least 30 controllers to be effective. Awkward for foot controllers! I have two ideas for a workaround: 1) my Yamaha MFC10 controller has a x10 button that puts all subsequent footswitch presses into another "bank" of sorts. I could assign the same footswitches to controllers on different channels and effectively switch between Ableton tracks by using the x10 switch to change controller banks on the foot controller. 2) Write a little midi input mapper that will map controller events to different channels, with the destination channel switchable via controller. So I'd have a footswitch to change the mapped channel and setup Ableton to responsd to different channel for each track. If you'd like more details let me know. Anyone have any other ideas?
 
Still, I'd be happy to find something more versatile with Live. Something that allows easier overdubbing, better midi controller support. I looked a little at Reaktor, and the NI people sent me this link on using Reaktor for live looping (haven't read it yet myself):

http://www.nativeinstruments.de/page.php?id=r3tutlive_us

Cheers,
Michael Stauffer
michael@circular-logic.com
www.circular-logic.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: gsj3 [mailto:gsj32002@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 6:58 AM
To: per@boysen.se
Cc: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Using computers as a Live Looper - software alternatives

Dear Per,
 
THANKS a lot for your quite informative answer.  Its really interesting to hear various views and experiences, so I hope my posting gets some other quality responses.
 
A couple questions:

>All software lack "overdub layering sound-on-sound into a
>spinning loop" features.
 
The really promising one seems to be Ambiloop:
http://www.evenfall.com/ambiloop/index.html
Unfortunately, I have an old sound card for my desktop, so the latency is too slow to rythmic stuff.  Also I have to do some MIDI mapping so I can control it without using my hands.  This software is still developing, and seems that we should really encourage the developers!
 
However, I think many of the software like Reaktor basically let you build your own instruments, and so developing looping applications should be possible.  People seem to have done this with KYMA, but that software requires expensive external hardware to run.
 
>"to cut in/out different note values to create rhythms"
 
What do you mean by that?
 
 
>Ableton Live is pretty close, but it is still lacking both "overdub/layering into a loop" and >"cutting note value slices out of/into a loop".
So Ableton will let you capture the live audio and loop it (live), but then not overdub onto it?  If not, can you just keep adding new tracks on the fly?
 
Thanks again!
 
Gregory
 


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