RE: Foot timing, syncing loops with Ableton

[Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

Very interesting, Claude. I'm listening to and enjoying Loulou is in love
right now, and I do expect to try out some of your fingerstyle techniques
when I get a breather.

I don't know if you can do this with other systems, but I like ending my
loops by playing the first note of the cycle on my guitar - first, I press 
a
footswitch for an alternate ending to "Record". Then my program detects the
next incoming note (above a threshold) and ends the loop there (I forget
whether or not I trim a few ms off the end to compensate for threshold
detection lag). This seems to work pretty well. I also ordered a Trigger
Finger yesterday, will experiment with what it's like to end loops with a
finger tap. I think it might be a little more precise for me than a foot
tap. I think I'm finally starting to let go of the concept that everything
needs to be controllable from my feet.

BTW, I've finally seen the light and decided that my MAX-based looping
system gains the most flexibility when it becomes the sync master and then
delegates a lot of the work to Ableton. In particular, it solves the
"recording the first Live loop without a metronome" issue. I haven't yet
figured out how to best divide all the looping/recording work between the
two apps, but this lets me bring in drum clips and the like that are synced
to the loop *after* the loop has already been recorded, rather than the
other way around. I'm also sending MIDI clocks M-Audio Black box - which 
has
a lot of cool beat-synced fx in it (there are many things I'm not in love
with about the box, but these fx are great, and those reservations are for
another post).

There are so many signals floating around here, I'm not exactly sure how/if
it's all going to get captured to disk in realtime, but that's not my
primary concert at the moment.

This is all running very easily on a 2GHz MacBook non-pro, which, btw, is
also the best Windows computer I ever had.

Best wishes,
Warren Sirota
>