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Looper's Delight
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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! http://www.earthlight.net/Gallery_Front.html - Cartoons! http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack.html - More Cartoons!