Re: Riff Box

[Jeff Larson <Jeffrey.Larson@Sun.COM>]

Chris Sewell wrote:
> Anyone try the new Riff Box by Backline Egineering? (http:// 
> www.backline-eng.com/). It looks like it has some interesting things  
> going on. Im still waiting for the perfect looper.

It has been discussed a few times, in a nutshell:

    - it supports one loop
    - it does not support being a MIDI sync slave
    - it does support being a MIDI sync master
    - it is designed to perform looping operations automatically
      with minimal footswitch presses

They are quite proud of a feature that automatically detects the loop
start and end points by monitoring the incoming audio signal to
determine where the "beats" are.  If you have a clean signal and
play music with obvious beats, this probably works reasonably well.
But I suspect many users will find this difficult to control and
resort to the typical two-tap method of defining the loop length.
It will depend on your looping and musical style.

It has a concept called "modes" which you can think of like
a sequence of looping operations performed automatically with
one footswitch press.  If what you want to do fits within the
constraints of a mode, this could be quite handy.  But if you
prefer to do free-form loop evolution (ambient, glitch, group
improvisation), you may not find this useful.  Again, it depends
on the style of music you want to make.

Jeff