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Looper's Delight
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OK, let's see. (Note that all of this concerns Reaktor 4, but max/msp can do the same stuff. With Reaktor you can create UIs with big ol' blinky lights, XY pads, scopes, sliders, buttons, wave form displays, bitmaps, and stuff like that--so that you can decide what sort of information will be displayed to you on your screen. If you are curious about people who are using laptops to do live looping, check out i.e. Christian Fennesz or Tomas Korber.) I have one looper that uses the audiotable module in Reaktor to capture and play back incoming audio. since the audiotable works by essentially storing audio bits in a matrix of cells, you can set it up to overdub only on selected cells. To simply things, there is a grid of 16 possible "cells" that make up each loop. Each of the cells can be set to overdub or play in reverse independently of the others. So you could, for example, record a loop, then set only certain cells to contunuously overdub, so that the majority of the loop remains while selected parts are constantly changing as you continue to play. Does that make sense? It might be a little convoluted. The grid is layered, so that you can record 4 different loops and switch between them. I have been thinking about using LFOs or controllers to dynamically change between the loop layers but I'm too lazy to do it right now. The whole thing can be clocked internally or externally so a primitive sort of time stretching is possible. It's pretty grainy, but I don't mind that. It definitely adds texture. I have another looper, using the grain cloud delay module, that allows you to break incoming audio, live or frozen, into seperate grains, which can be pitch shifted, time stretched, lengthened or shortened. You can juggle the grains to make nice jittery rhythms or just have things constantly shifting a bit. Feedback can be turned off or inverted, so this can function much like a delay or only as a looping recorder. I also added a nice multimode filter with a dynamic envelope and LFO modulation. This patch can take loops from straight up to totally unrepresentative of what you just played. I have another looper that uses the tape deck module to record and loop incoming audio and an XY graph to vary the playback position of each slice of the loop over time. You can also change the speed of playback, but this effects pitch too. I just downloaded someone else's looper off the NI website the other day that functions like a bank of tape loops, more or less. Each of the five loops can be pre-timed by button presses to set the length. This one is a little primitive but the way it's put together makes it sound nice. Audio only loops if feedback is turned up all the way, so some of the loops can act as delays while others are doing the looping. It's also worth noting that any of these kinds of techniques can be combined into one patch. You could use an input router, which could be automated or modulated even, to send incoming audio to different looper chains. And of course you can construct compressors, limiters, filters, reverbs, and so forth for additional textures. Any type of midi controllers can be used. If you can get used to the various foot switch routines for hardware loopers, you will have no problem here. A footswitch for controlling things while you're playing and a table-top midi controller for when you are tweaking would set you up. And since you can add LFOs or tempo-based modulation to any patch, some functions can be set into motion on their own for hands-free tweaking out. You could use a graphic pattern sequencer with snapshot recall to make certain preset parameter changes while you are playing and looping. So the changes would be decided in advance, but your playing could be different every time. I don't know if any of this stuff is worthwhile to you all, but I just thought of a few new things I could do while I was writing all of this down. Hope this helped! B.