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Looper's Delight
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Hi, I don't play out all that much, but I've done theater sound design and toured for several years as the Kronos Quartet's sound guy. So I'm spoiled with load-in times measured in days rather than minutes. The last time I performed with my looping setup I had a hand-truck which I prewired offstage then rolled on. This made it possible to start playing into a loop even before getting up on stage; even though the dolly held two 12 space racks, plus a Yamaha 03D and a Powerbook. For interconnecting the racks, I've made wiring harnesses which bring everything from each rack out to Elco connectors, like the ones on the back of ADAT's. Then I have a bunch of fat Elco 16-pair patch cords; so I can unplug the processing racks from the Elco-ized patch bay rack in my home studio, and plug them directly into each other and into the mixer for live use. I cut little doors in the back of the SKB rack covers, so the back doors can stay on and the racks look pretty clean. As well as that worked, it sure doesn't fit under an airplane seat, which is my criteria for a good live rig. That's why I've spent the last three years working toward replacing the whole rig with a laptop or two. I've solved the latency issue as far as looping is concerned, and completed a few features which I have always wanted but never found in dedicated hardware boxes: reverse-offspeed playback while continuing to overdub, graphic timing display for multiple different-length loops, multi-level undo, and sampler-style random access to fragments of a loop. I have all this working, but yeah, it still crashes enough that I wouldn't be doing anyone any favors by posting it just yet. I just joined this list a couple months ago, prior to that I had no idea there were so many other people still playing with long regenerant (or degenerate?) delays. The first looping concert I gave was in 1977, playing my just-built electric upright bass with a pair of Ampex 1/2" four track decks 30 feet apart behind a curtain. The curtain caught and broke the tape as it went up, so I've enjoyed the risk factor of live looping from the beginning. Perhaps that explains why I think a software solution will be viable. (That, plus the idea that if you try and enter your datebook into your echoplex, it doesn't work so well either:-) -Alex S.