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Looper's Delight
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First off: That TC unit sounds great. Keep us posted and if anyone manages to get one, I'm expecting a review. As an aside, if you haven't gotten a Vortex, or gotten your hands on one, you really need to experience it to see what the fuss is all about. It should have been a music biz success story, but it's kind of like the Ensoniq Fizmo is the Lexicon Vortex of synths. Nobody could figure out what it did, the presets were either too tame or too extreme depending on who you asked and finally when the marketing didn't really work they were sold off at a bargain price. The Vortex ads I kept seeing in guitar magazines emphasized the strange effects: BLEEN, ORBITS, etc. and guitar players can be notoriously conservative, especially since grunge came into prominence in the early 1990s. Me, I was always from Venus or Saturn so it was the perfect piece of gear for me. Everyone else was into the vintage thing, I was way the hell out beyond the outer rings somewhere. I've had a series of comments by people I've played with on the unit and the comments I kept hearing was that my sound was definetely my own, which made me happy anyway. Some of the other comments seemed to reflect on the fact that I should be wearing a space suit while playing. Pass the anti-grav boots. Check out my Vortex page at: http://www.waste.org/~crash/loopage.html I've got the full Lexicon applications notes for the Vortex duplicated there (without their permission, but the document was rare to begin with so...) as well as some links and other stuff. Oh, and I've got some mp3s of some loops I did recently (although they might go away in favor of some even newer ones). Secondly: I remember Quad well. My old public library actually had a Quad section where you could check out Quad recordings. In some cases the quad versions were way different than the more common stereo versions. A friend's parents owned a giant wooden all-in one monster-osity that could play quad recordings. There was an extra set of speakers that were silent until you played a quad recording. It was kind of weird because it didn't really surround you, but as you sat in front of it you got the quad effect. Sort of. Some memories of quad recordings: the QS version of Santana's "Welcome", that was a real rush. Everything had an extra layer of percussion on it. I especially remember that tune with the kalimba and Santana on bass and lots of extra percs. What else? Flame Sky - insane as it was, it was almost out of control in quad, another set of drums and percussion and I believe there were extra guitars. Crazy. Thoughts on Quad/Surround, Looping and Long Form Work: It's too bad that Quad didn't catch on, but now that surround sound stereo systems have become popular again (Dolby surround systems)( it's been a very tempting idea to do some work in this area. The mastering tools for computers are getting to the point where one can work in 5.1 and create a CD in that format. Now how looping fits into this: I once belonged to an electronic music mailing list where it was discussed that extremely long form pieces could be played, but the storage medium of the CD may or may not fit the bill. Well, the humble Hi-Fi VCR would allow you to potentially do an extremely long-form piece by recording the output of a looper direct into a mixer and into the VCR. Now, not all Hi-Fi VCRs have a good front end to them - some have annoying compression but some do not. And the Hi-Fi VCR that I have creates really decent sound. I've created 8-hour mixes of music for parties and the like. The sound quality is so close to the CD that you cannot tell the difference. It's somewhat better than MPEG-3 at 160 kbps. Most MPEGs you find on the net are encoded at 128 and I can hear the aliasing there. Ick. 160 sounds good though. And the longest looper I have is the Procrastination audio looper by Ken Mistove and that sucker is really* conducive to loops that go on for a long time. For instance, that "Unravelling" thing I put up on my web site is just the last seven minutes or so of a 40 minute plus piece. And I could have easily gone on for hours doing that. I've seen up to 9 hour tapes available and I may just do a long-form loop piece in the future and then the only way you could get it from me would be to order a VHS tape with it on there... I could do short excerpts and put them on the website to entice the masses, I imagine. Anyway, I thought about the concept of long form pieces mainly because guys like Steve Roach were doing all night concerts where people would actually bring sleeping bags and sleep during portions. I think that some tranquil looping might just do the trick here. My 2 cents, anyway. -Todd http://www.waste.org/~crash/index.html