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Looper's Delight
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A simple question--does the riffbox do "sound-on-sound" looping. Once a loop is going, can you continue to record and layer new sounds on top of it? Thanks, a quick look at the backline website didn't seem to give any answers. On 5/11/05, Marc Benigni <Marc.Benigni@yale.edu> wrote: > Hi all. I'm new to the list but I've got a couple of old friends here. >I > recently purchased a RiffBox and wrote up a pretty long review for >another > forum. I thought it might be more useful/ interesting to the loopers > delight crowd, so I'm sort of cross posting. I hope the length of this, >my > first contribution, isn't a problem: > > This is long, so I'll start with the very short version: well worth the > money if you can imagine having any use for a looper. If the "long >version" > gets too far off on tangents etc. I'd be happy to answer specific >questions. > > I haven't had nearly as much time as I'd like to play with the RiffBox, >but > I think its about time I posted that review. I'll continue to post ideas >and > eventually sound clips here, until someone says, "Stop! You're WAY > off-topic!" > > First of all, I still love the thing. I have found a couple of >shortcomings, > but I believe most of them can be easily overcome or worked around. > > I tested the unit for a couple of nights in the Vetta's effects loop, >then > for about a week as a send from my the Delta 66 on my PC, running Guitar > Rig. I used an external footswitch so I could have the controls >available on > a desktop (and because I wasn't really in a hurry to be stomping on my >shiny > new toy. I tested with electric guitars with magnetic and piezo pickups, > clean and distorted, and I tested with an acoustic guitar. > > Backline Engineering is a startup company, so packaging and documentation > are simple affairs, but everything is in clean and professional order. >The > unit itself is also very old-school, with its 7-segment LEDs etc. Not the > prettiest thing, but it gives you that cool sense that you're playing > something out of the ordinary. > > Sound quality is excellent, to the point that I don't have much to say >about > it. Without giving much thought to levels, loops out sounded > indistinguishable from the signal I was feeding in. On a Sonar bus on the > PC, where levels and routing are very flexible, its a total no-brainer. >The > only concern I had was with the Vetta effects loop: its a relatively >quiet > signal, and I could not get it to clip the RiffBox's input. This made it >a > little bit hard to diagnose problems at first, and (pure speculation >here) > may impact the RiffBox's ability to track events. > > Which leads us to "events"... definitely the most significant feature, >and > probably what Gary's patent is all about. You can program the RiffBox to > count events - notes or chords that reach a given threshhold - as you >play. > Looping begins automatically on the first event, and playback begins on >the > (n+1)th event, where n is the count you specify. So, theoretically, you >can > specify 8 events, play one bar of eighth notes, and RiffBox will repeat >that > measure. What's cool is that it doesn't try to analyze tempo or anything, > it's just waiting on that next event, so you can play your measure >square or > swing it very widely and the loop will still work fine. > > The challenge is that guitars sustain quite a lot, so if you are playing >at > all quickly, you need to be playing evenly, with an intentional >staccato, in > order for events to count out consistently. Gary's addressed this matter > creatively by allowing you to record a wet guitar signal while triggering > based on a dry one - sort of a sidechain concept. This helps a lot, but >even > clean guitars are sustainy. Acoustics are more percussive and so fare a >bit > better, but all told, at typical tempos (say 80-120 bpm) 8th notes are a > more realistic proposition than 16th notes. (More on this later.) > > The issues inherent in counting events aren't so gloomy though, since in > most cases you won't know the number of notes you intend to play in >advance > anyway. 9 times out of 10 you'll use a manual mode - you hit the switch, >and > the RiffBox loops beginning on the very next event. This is really just a > refinement of the typical looper, where you press the switch and looping > begins immediately. But its a BIG refinement. The result is glitchcore > without the glitches. A bit of practice and loops start coming out *very* > clean. And in this scenario you can play fast, legato runs without >worry, so > long as the last note is distinct from the first, and you hit that pedal > somewhere in between. i.e. if there's a rest at the end of the >measure(s), > you're golden. > > Once you've got a loop in there, there are many (too many for me to have > tested them in full in a mere week or two), many modes to determine how >it > will then behave. All are variations on "stop after n repetitions", "fade > over n repetitions", etc. which, when combined with layering options make > for some cool, musical effects without the tap-dancing typically >required. > > You can also wire this thing up to a drum machine or sequencer and when >your > loop starts the drum machine will start, synced up at the correct tempo. > This is a cool feature, but I would love to see a mode that could follow >my > tempo as I continued playing! > > I've e-mailed a couple of suggestions to Gary, most of them minor, and >most > of which can be corrected in firmware at his discretion - things like > changing LED colors to make status more clear etc. One major concern I >have > is that I find it pretty easy to accidentally stop a loop and not be >able to > restart it (because I'm armed to record again), or to corrupt a loop >with a > bad layer (to be clear, *my* bad playing LOL) and not be able to revert. >I > think Gary's thinking these things through now, and maybe he can post his > thoughts here. > > My last and biggest recommendation concerns that whole "guitars are > sustainy" discussion above. Warning, this gets very geeky. Since I had >my > guitar routed through a PC, I realized I might be able to process the >"dry" > signal RiffBox was triggering on to help simulate a staccato signal, >while > my playing as recorded and looped could remain as expressive as I like. I > still believe this can be done with an expansion algorithm or something. >But > I didn't happen to have a plug-in that was right for the job. So >instead, I > ran my guitar's MIDI output to a softsynth, set that to a very staccato > transient tone, and ran *that* output to the RiffBox. This improved > performance considerably when I tried to achieve consistent event >counts. It > occurred to me that the RiffBox could probably be programmed to respond >to > any MIDI Note On events as if they were event threshholds, and for >keyboard > or guitarists with GK pickups the unit would benefit greatly. > > In conclusion: well, I guess I started with my conclusion. I think this >box > is a very good value for the money, when I consider all the other loopers > I've tried that, for my purposes, proved completely unusable. Hopefully >Gary > will manage to get some retail distibution. Check one out! > > -- Art Simon simart@null.net http://art.simon.tripod.com http://artsimon.iuma.com