Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
i think i'm qualified to answer this because i have spent a fair amount of time trying to do essentially the same thing. i had been using a boss rc-20xl, an old roland sre-555 chorus echo (tape echo with "sound on sound" function, allowing you to create short tape loops) and a mixer so that i could make two loops running usually out of phase with one another, producing interesting results. i had it set up so one send on the mixer went to the boss and the other to the tape echo. eventually i would change this approach a little bit by returning both sends to a channel on the mixer instead of the returns, so i could take either loop and route it to the other if i desired, enabling me to recycle loops from the tape echo onto the boss or vice versa. problem is, the quality of the tape loops deteriorates rather rapidly, since it is basically getting rerecorded every pass through the loop. so i don't use the tape echo anymore. instead i have sought out digital devices that will behave like tape when i want them to. the most primitive way of doing this i found was to get an akai s2000 off ebay for $100. with that in the place of the tape echo in the same or equivalent setup, i could sample things from any input in the mixer, including loops from the boss and use midi notes from a keyboard to trigger the samples at different pitches or using the pitch wheel to change the speed of the samples like a tape machine. with a sampler you can also, of course, save your sounds. i wouldn't necessarily recommend this exact sampler for several reasons which i won't go into, but any sampler capable of looping a recorded sample and accepting midi triggers will do. the akai s20 is another one i use, which is really cool except for the fact that it only has a floppy drive, so transferring large amounts of sound to and from it won't be easy. i use it as a live looper so it's perfect for what i want. your question comes at an interesting time, as well, because i just got my 2880 in the mail today. as far as i was able to ascertain through reviews, it was the perfect piece of looping gear. having used it for a few hours now, i must say it's certainly damn close. the sound quality is impecable, and the ability to have 4 loops going that you can mix separately is really nice. and of course, the tempo slider rules. the other nice thing is the ability to record any combination of tracks down to a mixdown track, letting you either free up the other tracks or put the mixdown track into "constant tempo" mode where the tempo slider and reverse functions do not affect it. by far the biggest bummer of the 2880 is the one loop per card thing. for what i want it for, it's not really that much of a big deal, but if you are planning on using it for prerecorded loops, it won't make much sense. i would say that from the sound of it, you may want to consider a jamman for your prerecorded loops and sounds (basically the same as the boss rc-20xl that i use, except in hindsight the nice thing about the jamman is it stores 9 times as many loops and i believe it has a flash card) and the 2880 as a control center for layering and manipulating those sounds, or some kind of dj sampler like the akai s20 or the dr. sample, which will let you layer loops and have some tape-like pitch freedom. of course, i could be way off the mark and making certain wrong assumptions about what you want to accomplish, but there's my 2 cents. hope some of it may help you decide what to do. regards, mike > > Essentially, I would like to replicate having > several reel-to-reel > tape machines in a live performance situation. I > would like to > simultaneously play and process pre-recorded loops > as well as record, > playback and process loops live from various sources > (probably using a > mixer). > > I was very hopeful about the 2880 until discovering > that one can only > store one loop on a single flash card. I assume > this means I cannot > prepare loops at home, save them onto the flash card > and load the > card/samples during a performance. > > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com