Re: Foot controller for a dream looper

[Mark Hamburg <mark@grubmah.com>]

On Mar 21, 2011, at 10:54 AM, Daniel Thomas wrote:

No matter what your platform, (i prefer them all :)  the price of admission to create unique and idiosyncratic art with a looper is often high.  Thats not to say that you can't make great looping art with a delay pedal, but if you want to innovate performance workflows that facilitate your own compositional style, you may have to buck up the midnight oil in a very big way.  I certainly have had to pay a lot of dues to the "WTF-is-going-on-now-Gods" in order to break through on any looping platform...HW or SW.

On the one hand, we have hardware loopers like the EDP and the Boomerang III that get a lot of mileage out of their controllers. (It's pretty impressive what the Boomerang III promises to do with five buttons, but I haven't actually played one to see how well it delivers.)

On the other hand, we've got the Looperlative which offers a lot more depth and looping capability than the EDP and Boomerang, but expects more UI tuning to build your own experience and because it works with a range of devices of varying sophistication doesn't seem to be able to hit the control polish levels that the EDP and the Boomerang III have even with relatively expensive foot controllers. It's a pity because the fundamental device does offer a lot more.

Let's look at one of my more complicated button definitions: the rec/dub/undo button.

First, the notion of using a long press for undo came from somewhere else that I don't remember right off. (LP2?) It works because toggling overdub is rarely a timing critical operation and hence using the "end short press" event to toggle overdub while using "end long press" to trigger undo works pretty cleanly.

Second, a lot of the distinction about what to do if stopped v playing v recording v overdubbing in the short press case is what the Looperlative record/dub command already does and what the corresponding switch on a Line 6 looper does.

Third, using a long press when triggering record to signal that it shouldn't be synced doesn't have any precedent but it seemed a reasonable way to provide access to both synced and unsynced recording without needing another record/dub switch.

So, my wish list may have looked complicated, but I don't think anything on it was that wild.

I watch people at shows looking for places to balance their laptops when setting up and it doesn't feel right to me. Maybe for the non-mobile rig, however.

I spend a fair amount of my time at work worrying about user interface issues and control sets. I used to write simple audio code (long, long ago on a Z80). But I know that I'm not going to build my own hardware because that's not where my skills lie. What's more, with various things seeming so close, I keep hoping that I can find the combination that would let me access a reasonable chunk of the looping prowess of the Looperlative with as polished a control interface as the "less sophisticated" loopers because doing software development for a living, I really would rather be making music than writing more software.

(Okay. I've said I don't want to do software development, but give me a Forth interpreter in the LP-1 and a MIDI controller that can send press begin, short press end, and long press end messages and the ability to recognize those messages on the LP-1 and I could probably hit a lot of what I'm looking for.)

Mark