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Looper's Delight
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Effected Loopers- I use a Yamaha A5000 sampler as an outboard effects processor. It's funny, because the A5000 has SIX effects blocks which you can route in parallel or series and 96 (some of which are two or more effects at once, so it's really more than 96) different effects, each with up to 16 parameters that can be adjusted beforehand and/or controlled by MIDI continuous control messages. Effects like delay and flange can sync to MIDI clock via the program LFO. As far as inputs go, you can either send the right and left to the effects as a stereo pair, or turn right and left into two mono channels. But, if you do the mono route and you send the signal to a stereo delay, it will still make your signal stereo! The A4/5000 comes with two stereo pairs of outputs, so you could plug in two guitars or whatever (on into the L input and one into the R), run them through effects, and get two seperate stereo signals off the back of the sampler. If you add the AIEB2 expansion board, there's another three stereos pairs of outputs to play with and a SPDIF out. I'm just reading all this stuff about the MPX G2 (76 effects, 7 in a row, $1,349), and the MPX1 (54 effects, 4 in a row plus reverb, $699) and saying, "Yeah my sampler pretty much does that -- and it's a sampler, too!" Since everyone thinks software samplers are so great the A4000s (three effects blocks) and A5000s (six effects blocks) are typically going for peanuts on Ebay, usually with all kinds of upgrades like maxed out memory and external SCSI peripherals. Unfortunately, you can only control four effects parameters at a time (period), via MIDI CCs. But, by creating different programs containing only effects information, you could send program change messages if you wanted to control different parameters. I made a program for my gigs last weekend that was TechMod (a ring modulator) --> LoFi (reduce the sample rate of the input to 2kHz) --> 3BandEQ --> Pitch1 (a two-voice pitch shifter, which I control via MIDI CC for dive bomb effects and squeals -- sorry, Digitech, I don't need your $199 Whammy pedal) --> Comp[ressor]. This makes the most wicked synth bass sounds I've ever heard that weren't actually synth bass. I am about ready to throw my Electroharmonix Bass Microsynth up on Ebay, because the A5K is much better. Here's some examples of the effects. Many of them are very unique, and many combine more than one effect... Scratch (adds an analog record scratch sound to the input signal) Auto-Syn (adds a weird synthesizer noise to the input) Tech-Mod (ring modulator) NoisAmb (adds noise and uses a delay to broaden the sound) Jump (cuts apart the input signal and applies extreme modulation to the playback order or speed) BeatChg (modifies waveform length of the sound in realtime) Pitch1 (changes the pitch of the input signal LoReso (simulates a lowered resolution of the input signal) Radio (simulates a radio) TurnTbl (simulates the noise of an analog record) OvDr+Dly (overdrive and delay are connected in series) AmpSimS (Stereo amp simulator) C+DS+DL (compressor, distortion, and delay are connected in series) W+OD+DL (auto-wah, overdrive, and delay are connected in series) etc. etc. These as well as the vanilla delay, stereo delay, chorus, stereo chorus, hi/lo/band-pass filters, several rotary speaker simulators, amp simulators, distortion (although, the distortion is crap), auto-wah, compression, eight different reverbs (all with adjustable parameters), and MIDI clock-syncable versions of effects. So, yeah, that's my contribution to the effects processor rants. Not only is the A5000 a killer effects processor, but you can playback monkey noises, or George Bush quote samples (oh, wait, those are nearly one in the same) during your performance should you desire it. -Jesse