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Re: Guidance In Buying First Loop Machine



Hi Bill-
    You wrote:
Do you find the looping time to be enough to fulfill your needs?
 
Yes, more than enough. The only situation where I would imagine the need for more time would be a traditional song form, where someone might wish to  create a verse in one loop and a chorus in another. Each part could be 30-40 seconds long. The DD20 is NOT the machine for this kind of looping.
 
...and...
 
I'd like to be able to create a sonic wall of sound, so to speak.  With that in mind, my second question is: how many loops can you create on top of each other?
 
Infinite.
The nature of your questions makes me wonder if you're grasping how the DD20 works. Think of it as a very long digital delay. Most delays function in the 300ms-2 second range. You begin playing, and a second later there it is again.
And again a second later.
And again a second later.
And again a second later.
 
If the delay is set to 100% feedback, the sounds will keep repeating at the same volume, theoretically forever. You can continue to play on top of these repeats, and the new sounds will lay atop the old. A good digital delay will duck and compress the audio as it layers so that it sounds "thicker" with the new sounds without sounding sludgy or distorting. The DD20 is very good at this. You could think of it as an infinite number of digital recorders, all recording and playing back forever. I envision it as the "cabin scene" in the Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera," a room filling with more and more people. Just remember that the DD20 has a delay of up to 23 seconds, so a lot of sound can go in before it starts to repeat.
 
 If the delay is set to less than 100% (say, 75%), then the effect is more like "traditional" echo. If the delay is very short, we associate the repeating (and decaying) sound with an acoustic space, like a big gymnasium or a canyon. But when the delay exceeds about 3 seconds, it functions more like a signpost in a landscape, slowly getting smaller and smaller. Or like our own memories of an event, slowly receeding with time. Remember, with the DD20, you can crank this up to 23 seconds, and continue to layer sounds upon sounds upon sounds, all gently receeding into the mists of passed time.
 
There are limitations to the DD20, to be sure. You can't have one delay crankin' away at 14 seconds, a second delay at 12.8 seconds, and a third delay at 17.4 seconds, etc. etc. But you CAN have TWO different delays at one time by switching to a new patch. You can have one delay at 14 seconds and another at 12.8, for instance. Read through the review of the DD20 on the Loopers Delight web page again if this remains unclear. Also, if you listen to the excerpt from "The Long Dance," you'll hear dozens and dozens of guitars by the time you get 30 seconds into it. I did that with two DD-20s and a few short delays generated from my Boss GT-3, live. For the sake of that performance I layered two takes, but it is fundamentally the same as the sound I get live. 
 
I'm sure you won't mind if I post this on the Loopers Delight forum as well. New loopers are always appearing, and an occasional refresher course in what an old looper does is always useful. (Read that last sentence two ways: "looper" as looping device, and "looper" as looping person!)
dB, coyote