Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
At 6:38 PM -0700 8/3/01, Gary Lehmann wrote: >Miko queried: >>>OK... I want to know if you can insert (replace mode) while multiplying? >The other modes don't seem to apply here because they mess with the time >structure of the multiply, but I'd love to have the ability to replace >while >doing a multiply. Anyone? > >So I gave it a whiz! >And it sure does replace! 'Course I had to turn the quantize off, as well >as setting insert to replace, but when I multiplied and then inserted >DURING >multiply, it elegantly inserted audio which did not include the material >being multiplied! > yes, that is correct, but there is much more. On the EDP you can easily switch back and forth between multiply and insert on the fly, without stopping one to start the other. I think this accomplishes what Miko is looking for, where you are creating an overdub over several repetitions of the original cycle and for some portion you only want the overdub without the audio of the original. You can do this easily with the echoplex in real-time. Just record your basic loop cycle, then start the multiply and begin adding the longer overdub. As long as the multiply is on, you will be overlaying the new audio on top of repetitions of the audio in the basic cycle. If that is all you wanted to do, then after you have the number of cycle repetitions you wanted, you tap Multiply to end it and start looping the whole thing. That is the basic multiply function. You create a basic loop repeating many times under a longer loop, on the fly. However, say you wanted a section of the multiplied loop that only has your overdubbed audio without the audio of the original. You could do this by finishing the multiply and then using Insert to add that section on the next time through the loop. That might be musically awkward though. So, the Echoplex lets you do it directly during the Multiply, by switching into Insert on the fly! Go back to where we had the multiply going. When you want cycles with just your overdubbed audio and the audio of the original loop cycle muted, hit the Insert directly without hitting the multiply first. The echoplex will keep on going as if you were still in multiply, except that now the original loop audio is muted out. You keep on playing your overdub as cycles of the orginal length are added to the overall loop length. When you want to end the loop, just press Insert again to end it. With this idea, you could easily create a 12 bar loop on the fly where the first 10 bars are a basic 1-bar rhythm cycle repeated with some longer melody over the top, and the last two bars are a break with just the melody by itself. You don't have to construct the thing in several passes over the loop, you just do it in one shot. Now taking this further, you can jump back into Multiply on the fly if you want, just by hitting multiply again instead of ending with Insert! So you can switch back and forth on the fly between having the original audio underneath your longer overdub or having it muted, just by switching back and forth between pressing Insert and Multiply during the Multiply process. The interesting thing here is, the audio being multiplied under your second multiply is in fact the multiplied/inserted audio you had created in the beginning of the process before you re-entered the multiply! To end all of that and start it looping, you simply press again whichever one you are in at the time. For example, if the Insert is active, press Insert again and it will round off to the end of the current cycle time and end for you. Your whole multiplied/inserted loop will then begin looping. That might seem kinda confusing, maybe this example helps. Let's take the 12 bar loop we were creating above as a starting point and expand on that. Instead of just 12 bars, say we want 48 bars that consist of our original 12 bar multiplied/inserted idea repeated 4 times with a 48 bar melody over the top. We want to create this quickly in real-time without boring our audience and ourselves to death with a lot of fiddling around. So it goes like this: You tap Record and play a little percussive thing for four beats. Instead of ending with Record, you tap multiply and immediately begin playing a twelve bar chord progression. Your 1 bar of percussion repeats under you as you play. As the 10th bar ends, you tap Insert to drop out the percussion and play a two bar turnaround or something. As the 12th bar ends you tap Multiply again. Now the previous 12 bars of rhythm and chord progression that you just created will be added to itself as you continue to add new things over the top. You start playing your longer melody. (The multiple display will continue to count cycles for you, so you will see it starting onto 13 at this point.) When the counter is up to 48 cycles (bars in this case, or 4 repetitions of our 12 bar figure), you tap multiply again to end it all and start the whole thing repeating. One thing to note here is, because we did this all on the fly, the first 12 bars were created without that much longer melody overdubbed. So you actually have the first 12 bars repeated 4 times with a longer melody overdubbed on the last 3 repetitions. Depends what you are after, that might be what you want. But if what you really want is a 48 bar melody over 4 repetitions of the 12 bar figure, that is easily done in this on-the-fly method as well. We just need one more action at the end. When you re-enter Multiply after the twelve bar part was created above, go ahead and start your 48 bar melody. The counter will say 13, and that is really where you are, but we are just going to shift things a bit. When the counter gets up to 48 you will be on bar 36 of your melody. At that point above, we pressed Multiply again to finish the operation and start it looping. Instead, press Overdub. This will do basically the same thing, it will end this multiply and start the whole thing looping, except you will immediately have overdub on. You just keep on playing your melody as the first 12 bar section plays underneath. 12 bars later you press overdub again and there ya go. A one bar percussion rhythm repeating 10 times and dropping out for 2 bars, with a 12 bar chord progression loop on top of it, with a 48 bar melody loop on top of that. All done in one shot, on the fly, with a grand total of 6 button presses. (I think I counted that right. :-) Obviously, this takes some practice to get the hang of it. But that's the nature of any instrument! Play with the ideas, and you will get it. or you will discover your own way to use it. You can do a lot of other interesting stuff by combining Multiply and Insert. For example, you can re-multiply a loop to a different number of multiplies, either more or less. So maybe you have an 8 cycle loop and you chop out 3 cycles to make that a loop. (you can chop it out anywhere too, no restrictions....). Or maybe you re-multiply it out longer to have 8 cycles + 3 for an 11 cycle loop. Or maybe you use Insert on a multiplied loop, to add some cycles in the middle of it or at the beginning or end. That's a great way to get chopped up sounding loops. Check out the stuff Andre LaFosse does on his "Disruption Theory" album. He is a master of this technique, basically using drum-n-bass production ideas of chopped up breaks, re-applied to chopped up guitar riffs, and he can do it all in real-time as he plays. Go nuts with Insert and Multiply combinations on a loop, and pretty quickly you will lose track of what the hell is going on, but you defintely end up with some pretty strange loops after a while! Or you can mix these things with other functions. Multiply and Insert always round off to the nearest cycle point, so things are automatically kept even and you don't have to be real accurate with the buttons. (which is great when you are busy concentrating on playing something else! Just tap it somewhere in the middle and the echoplex sets it right for you. Using Quantize makes this even more perfect, forcing everything to round to the cycle point.) But what if you don't want to round off a multiply or insert? Instead of an integer multiply, you want something uneven. Just end a multiply with record, wherever you want! That will give you a new loop that ends at exactly that point, and has a new loop time of whatever that is! Maybe you end up with 7.3 repetitions of your cycle or whatever. That is also great if you want chop out some bit of audio from a longer loop, but the audio chunk you want has nothing to do with the existing cycle time or the existing startpoints and endpoints. Just hit Multiply at the beginning of that bit and Record at the end, and you've got a new loop of just that. There ya go, real-time loop startpoint and endpoint editing, all done as you play. No fiddling around with mouse clicking or jog wheels or monitors or whatever. Leave that stuff in the studio! This real-time nature is one of the advanced uses of the echoplex that I think really sets it apart from everything else out there. No matter what you are doing, you can just jump right into something else. You don't have to stop this thing in order to start that thing, or be resticted to certain modes in order to use some function. You can mix functions together any way you want, probably in ways that we never even thought of in creating the thing. You just end one thing by going straight into the other! hopefully this is helpful. Now let's hear from some of the other experienced EDP users out there! (or novices!) How do you use these ideas, and what interesting techniques have you discovered? kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com