What's your looper control strategy?

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

What's your take on the ultimate question of finding a balance between
playing and controlling looper actions?

Personally my rig is set up with four stereo loopers in parallel.
Sometimes I create loops in all four to fade them in and out
seamlessly but other times I stick with only one channel and overdub
musical parts as new layers into the same loop, then typically
creating a bunch of (never more than five) alternative linear loops to
jump between as "A-B-C" song parts.

It was a year now since I skipped bringing a little MIDI hand mixer
and my recent live looping is all controlled by just one MIDI foot
pedalboard with ten switches and two expression pedal. However, I'm
now thinking of plugging in my old mini MIDI hand mixer again as well
as getting a third expression pedal in. I've been feeling
uncomfortable with the heavy "tap dancing" on the control pedals
needed for such a foot dependent control situation. I want to get back
to having most looper commands instantly available for both feet and
hands. My foot controller, the Gordius Little Giant 2, offers ten
switches in one bank and if you need to give a command that is
included in another bank you will have to first kick the bank change
switch, then kick the apart command, then kick the bank change switch
again in order to get back into the the bank where you are mostly
busy. Better than to stay in the fist bank and simply move one hand
off the instrument for two seconds to press a MIDI button on the side
table for the apart command. Or what?

The three expression pedals are for
1) Looper Feedback,
2) Live Audio Input Swell (manual fade-in/out, typically used to get a
soft violin-like note attack) combined with Freeze-reverb (in a
crossfade value manner).
3) Activating tremolo stuttering of the (pre looper) Freeze-reverb and
sweep through rhythmic values between 1/4 note and 1/68 note.

The looper function I have been dissing for the last year is Feedback,
but I want to get back to it now with this third expression pedal.
It's nice to have the option do pieces that focus on only one loop,
using the feedback function as a sculpturing tool.

With the returning little hand mixer I'm getting back to controlling
the Mobius looper's Secondary Feedback globally from a robust hand
mixer fader. I use Secondary Feedback for Substitute, as a way to
control how much of the old audio layers will be kept vs thrown out
under a new slice I cut into the loop. I tried to replace this hand
control fader by a foot switch set up as

1 click  = Secondary Feedback 0
2 clicks = Secondary Feedback 64 (my default)
3 clicks = Secondary Feedback 110
4 clicks = Secondary Feedback 127 (equaling "Overdub")

But it just got to too much tap dancing ;-))   And I noticed I often
need to dial in more precise Secondary Feedback values than those
four. And four rapid clicks on a foot switch is kind of the upper
limit for how many functions you can stack on the same switch anyway.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com
www.looproom.com internet music hub