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Looper's Delight
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Hey Per and Aaron (and also Jeff Larson btw), products like the xponent have been available for quite some time, and there's even really cheap ones to get you started (avoiding the B word here). On the other end of the (price) spectrum, you have solutions like Final Scratch, where you basically still have a set of turntables, playing timecode vinyl to control your software, which, according to DJ/turntablism people, works outstandingly. Now Per, you noted a reason for you to not use a turntable interface: > play different instruments while looping live and that keeps > my hands quite occupied. Here I might add: one of the beauties of loop playing is that, from time to time, you have the possibility to use your instrument-playing hands to e.g. work a set of wheels of steel while the loops are running on. > Regarding scratching and turnrtablism I've actually seen a > lot of that on this list. But most people use other physical > control surfaces than "stuff that looks like hand controlled > vinyl turntables". I think the most popular interfaces among > musician loopists is the expression style foot pedal. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a powerful looping tool (in our sense of the word, with all the overdub and first loop capability thingies going) that has a control interface that more relates to DJ work (correction: had to, until Flyloops implemented that). The typical looper has buttons for transport control (play/stop, reverse, halfspeed), and some loopers also add playback speed control (like the Repeater's varispeed or Mobius' Rate Shift). On the other hand, tools more targeted at a DJ-related market (which, on the other hand, often lack functions like first loop capability or overdub) sometimes offer also DJ-oriented transport control. One example would be the Kaoss pad series, where you have those algorithms where you can scratch your loop sample in various ways. Another example would be the Roland (I think) D2, which also has a scratch pad. Now Jeff (and this is why you're mentioned above): would it be possible to control a loop in Mobius with one of these controllers like a Kaoss pad, to "sratch" the loop? > hand knobs to twist. Anther DJ technique I'm relying on in > looping is the crossover mixer. I keep pre defined fades as Actually, Ableton Live implements a crossfader functionality (if that's what you're hinting at with "crossover mixer"), where you can assign any track to one of two busses and then mix between them with a crossfader - which, of course, can also be controlled by an expression pedal. > the EDP it's implemented as a direct jump between two loops - > I think even with the option of arriving at sync point > related to the other loop which is in praxis the same thing > as having two beatsynced turntables going and quickly > crossfading between them. I see this as different things - if a direct jump was the same as a crossfade, then all those (hiphop) DJ mixers would have a switch instead of a crossfader, wouldn't they? > The typical DJ filtering (punching in and out different > slices of the frequency range) is something I use in other > contexts and have been missing with my live looping rig > (laptop running Mobius hosted in > Bidule) but I just found a new VST plug-in that may finally help me > out: Again, Ableton Live has a plugin called "EQ3" which is a kind of DJ EQ: 3-band graphic eq, selectable crossover frequencies and filter steepness and kill switches for all three bands. I used to apply that a lot in my former (i.e. 2005-2007, as documented on my "Weird Specialist" album) work a lot, with one of those sitting on each track with loop content (drum machine, pre-recorded drum loops and Mobius returns).