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Re: Looper cencus



Sorry, I missed the beginning of this one somehow.  As the spelling is
'census' I assume that someone called for a poll of which looping devices 
we
use?  Or what got us into it?

1st Looper (1980):    two really old Bell reel-to-reel tape decks

The sound was awful and had no effects or compression attached to control
the geometrically-increasing noise, which eventually became a bizarre 
spiked
sound if left for too long.  The experiments done, I put the Bell decks 
back
in the closet, later to be sold by my parents when they moved out of the 
big
old house in NJ, along with my super8 film of the Moon landings (arrgh!).  
I
gave up on looped music for a while since it was too expensive to produce
anything that wouldn't drive the dogs in the next county insane.  And the
neighbors.  Kept the resulting tapes as a matter of archiving work, and 
will
eventually use some of it as interesting background noise.

2nd Looper (1992):    DigiTech DDS 7.6-second "Time Machine"

I bought it using some money I got after leaving a job in 1992, along with
my QuadraVerb+.  Still working, though the DDS does have this awful need 
for
a ground-break, and so cannot be used in facilities without a grounding
outlet (thankfully this has only happened once).

3rd Looper (1999?):    Two Zoom 2100 units

I bought the first one from Musician's Fiend, and the second one from David
M. from this list.  Still haven't figured out how to use most of the
features, and I hate the little buttons as well as the miniscule labels for
those buttons, which make the unit more suitable as a rack - close to the
eyes of course - but for the footpedals.  However, as a matter of course
it's generally manditory to have settings you rely upon, and if you've
succeeded in setting up and saving them, it's a breeze to select, and thank
God the LED digits are large enough for an old poop like me to read.

Most of the time I use the long sound-on-sound delay that the Zoom 2100
produces.  Very tape-like, but without the noise!  I use an A/B switch to
direct guitar through either of the 2100s, which then go to a Mackie
1202VLZ, which the DDS 7.6 is attached to on one of the aux loops.

I like to switch from the settings chosen to the recording/sampling mode,
after having produced a nice background loop and off-loading it to the DDS 
-
and then using the recording/sampling mode to set down a mid-lead loop of
sorts (I use the 32-second mode on each).  Over the background loop on the
DDS and the twin 2100s, I can then play lead on top of THAT.  So far so
good!

Stephen P. Goodman
EarthLight Productions
*
http://www.earthlight.net/Studios - The Free Loop of the Week!
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