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Looper's Delight
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For almost a decade now my favorite looping devices has been software - Mobius and Augustus Loop (before that I used an EDP with a slaved Repeater). One of my OS X laptops runs best with 64 bit code and since Mobius still is 32 only I decided to mock up a new laptop rig based on Augustus Loop, for this machine (still use Mobius in the USB loop to my Fractal amp). Here's the test run recording: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4963264/Augustus_Mainstage_SG12.mp3 I set up Augustus hosted in Mainstage and as the sync master, meaning that as soon as I record a loop all effects of Mainstage's will pick up the tempo. Well this is old news but a new thing for me was to do Multiply in Augustus. To be honest it works like "Instant Multiply" of Mobius rather than the traditional EDP-style Multiply (where you play along in real-time while the first loop gets multiplied behind your new added longer layer). Anyway, Augustus Loop doesn't just copy audio if increasing the loop length. The same engine is at work also if you shrink down the loop to a very short slice and this opens up for some fun stuttering loop mangling: Record a decently long loop, then change its length to a short fragment for a very short time and go back to the long length again. This will create a long loop just as you previous long loop but with the short time spent as "super shrinked" substitut by the stuttering short segment (you hear this in my example recording). I found it convenient to have pedals to switch between 1/32 and 1/4 Beat Divior, between 1/2 and 1/1 and between 4 Beats and 8 Beats. I think that gave enough tools for on-the-fly looping where you need to instantly change the loop's length and sometimes its content too. Another cool thing I found out is that you can use any LFO to trigger looping functions in Augustus. Then assign an on/off or (maybe better?) a momentary foot pedal to activate/deactivate the LFO. With this trick I could duplicate some of my favorite Mobius scripts. Typical cool target parameter for such LFO control are Input and Pitch. With a square wave LFO you get machine like slicing ("substitute stuff" in EDP-ish) but with a more nifty host like for example Numerology you may use LFO's that flows through slow ritardando vs accelerando. I also tried to duplicate Mobius Secondary Feedback functionality when replacing slices of the loop. This I did by having my foot pedal both open the Input and lower Feedback by the same action. However, when making Augustus Feedback level jump radically - like between 100% and 70% etc - a nasty click is introduced in the loop's audio. This has been an issue with Augustus Loop as far as I can remember. It got problematic (to my taste - others might like it) because I used non quantised pedal presses (these artefacts can not be heard in the example recording). Maybe I can find out a way to trigger only one cycle of a square wave LFO to make this "Substitute function" quantised and then get the click sounds turned musical? (as in clics n cuts style) The Fade function is also useful. The clip starts by fading in the entire loop and in the end I fade it out, both from the same pedal switch. I'm not totally dependent on live looping to play out though, here's a video of non looping playing - the kind of stuff I do as street busking now to survive in the bad economy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuwQWNk0kTM&feature=share&list=UUnSXZEo96CzV7dA2kQ6I3hQ Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.perboysen.com http://www.youtube.com/perboysen