report on the Live 8 looper.

[Tom Ritchford <tom@swirly.com>]

Warren Sirota and I made our first use of the Live 8 looper within an improvisational context and I have to say that I was very impressed.

I've been having some trouble with live (that I'll extract into another post) but it seems to work better for free-form jamming.

There was an initial glitch the first time I tried to insert a looper into the signal stream - I did it by selecting the two bar looper and double-clicking on it.  Immediately, all the other tracks jumped out of record mode.

I didn't try this again but the manual seems to say that double-clicking and drag-and-drop (which is what I did thereafter) should have the same effect... and says nothing about dropping out of record.  I'll 


I still don't full understand the looper - in particular, how to completely clear one seems to take far too many keystrokes - but I'm sold on it in the context of Live.  

Once I got into a working mode with it, it worked flawlessly for synched loops.  The integrated "one button looping" worked really well - I was using the Nano but I'm hoping my impending Rocktron Midi Mate will do just as well.  And I can just drop a new instance of the looper onto another track.

It has reverse, it has feedback, it has variable speed, what else do you want?  Everything else can be done with some plug-in for Live.


I have tried several other software loopers and many of them have their advantages but if you are using Live 8 there is no reason to use any other looper because it's free, it's right there, and it works really well.

-- 
     /t