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Looper's Delight
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Hi, This is my first post to this email list and I thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Rob McDade - I live in Adelaide in South Australia. I have been playing guitar for 20 years now - and am a long time prog rock fan. I have recently gotten heavily into looping. In a way I began a long time ago with my first delay pedal - but I recently discovered the potential with the equipment that is around today. I am a solo performer - I play a mixture of solo acoustic guitar (akin to Steve Howe, Michael Hedges and Will Ackerman); and electric loops which enable me to produce a band sound - a mini Pink Floyd or Mike Oldfield! My set up revolves around the BOSS DD20 which I bought for its delay functions - not aware that it has a sound on sound looping setting. Now that is my mainstay effect. I run a normal guitar -> boss pedal effects set up into a small behringer mixer, into which I also patch my acoustic guitar and a drum machine (Alesis HR16) the FX send of the Mixer runs thru the DD20. Despite its limitations at 23 seconds - the DD20 does give me quite a lot of flexibility with performance - esp if I run the SOS as the manual setting and pre set some long delays into the 4 memory banks. My performances involve setting up some Fripp-esque soundscapes using the long delay settings (particularly nice if using an ebow - and a standard digital delay pedal!). Switching the DD20 delay on and off - allows for normal decay of the delays (which might take a few minutes) and soloing over those - or whatever! Then switching to the SOS function (again while the delay 'soundscapes' decay naturally over several minutes) and setting up a loop - I mostly use 2 or 3 chord - chord progressions then enhancing with some percussion sounds which I tap in manually from the drum machine; and play a bass line using an octave pedal. When it works it sounds pretty cool - and has impressed quite a few punters when playing live. Solo over the top! Ending the performance is the trick - I can either fade out the loop using the mixer. I am thinking of getting a 2nd volume pedal to put after the output of the DD20 so I can fade out using my foot - while still playing lead - as opposed to fading out with one hand and soloing with the other - or just fading the loop on its own. Another option is to end the piece with a big, abrupt finish - stopping the loop dead and playing a huge chord or sustained note ; or while the loop is still running, switch back into one of the delay settings and build up another soundscape - then switch off the loop (rather abrupt finish) but the soundscape runs on. The footswitch settings need to be set up a special way to do that. Basically by stomping on both pedals at the same time you can switch between the memory banks. I am investigating another dedicated looping device such as the Boss RC 20 (XL) or the RC2 (more in my price range) and coming up with a more complicated signal flow using both DD20 and RC side by side. One option is to split the FX send into 2 signals, one into the DD one into the RC and then have 2 FX returns. Then they should not conflict with one another - I can have a soundscape running along side a loop and have more flexibility with each without affecting the other. One of the other visual performance highlights of all this is say swapping guitars mid song - start off a loop on acoustic guitar - play along for a bit and then switch to electric and build the piece. I suppose the next step is to get a guitar stand for my acoustic (ready to play) so I can have seamless interchange between the two instruments. It's about now that it's all getting very w@nky and nerdy and probably time I got some friends to jam with!! All good fun - and all very interesting to you readers, I'm sure. Hope to hear from fellow loopers soon. I'm sure I know some of you out there! cheers Rob McDade www.myspace.com/robmcdade www.mp3.com.au/robmcdade