Re: OT Tremelos, Choppers and Panners

["Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:
> on one of my favorite effects:
> _*Tremelos, Panners and Choppers*_
> ****************


A fav of mine a well. The first one I use was the pickup toggle switch
on my Gibson Les Paul guitar. Then a couple of decades passed until
analog filterbanks became available. I picked up an Akai MFC 42 to use
when looping with an Electrixpro Repeater and an EDP. The LFO of the
MFC42 is syncing to MIDI Clock so I ran the EDP as the sync master and
assigned a MIDI expression pedal to sweep through the musical beat
divisions of the BPM. But there was a problem with the MFC42; its MIDI
assignments were hardwired and unfortunately my Behringer FCB control
pedal leaked out random MIDI events that triggered the filterbank in
weird ways. So I sold it and got a TC Electronix FireworX instead.

The FireworX also has a lot of routing options to set up choppers,
even "chopper landings/take-offs" as when playing the LFO BPM division
from an expression pedal. Really cool stuff. With this box I learned
everything I needed about different ways to combine live input
chopping with choppings you crate in the loop. It's cool to sweep the
beat division from a pedal for your live input so you can play it on
feeling and directly find the settings that work nice with whatever
you've got in the loop at the moment. On TC I came to love patches
that doesn't let through your direct input, the just gated 16th notes,
8 triads etc.

Two years ago my laptop audio interface broke down the week before a
cools one week art festival and I wanted to play there so badly that I
sold both the Akai MFC42 filterbank and the FireworX in order to
afford a new audio interface for the laptop. Can't use heavy and bulky
boxes anyway if thinking about going around playing gigs. I had also
borrowed an Eventide Eclipse for a couple of months and studied how
the patches were routed inside it, as a preparation for the stage in
chopping where I am today:

using the SoundToys Native bundle plug-ins in MainStage. With these
plug-ins (ans some of Logic's/MainStage's plug-ins) I'm able to set up
the same effects I loved in those old hardware boxes, in the laptop.
I've even taken on a new application of the tremolo-chopper-gate patch
and that is to (1) assign an expression pedal to the real-time live
input (so I can morph between playing only the gated chops or the
natural live input sound) and (2) another expression pedal to the
Depth of the chopped out slices. This is way cool, because in one
position the patch sounds like a huge cathedral ambience while at the
other pedal position the patch is pounding like a punchy techno mix.
IMHO the SoundToys plug-ins is actually better then the hardware boxes
because they allow you to set up the tremolo-chopping-slicing-panning
with a swing percent added to the beat. That's what I've always missed
way back from listening to the first choppings presented by Juno
Reactor to my own chopper scripting in Mobius. I love a healthy fifty
two to fifty four percent groove factor in a beat - that's how I like
to play myself and I'm very happy now to have electronics that can do
the same feel. This swing factor is why I'm always looking for an
alternative to Mobius, some looper where you could set up controller
MIDI loops for chopping and slicing effects so you can make them
happen in a musical groove. The Ableton Live / Augustus Loop is a good
combo in that regard, but less good in other regards.

I once saw Lee Ranaldo, of Sonic Youth, do a very cool manual audio
slicing by alternately kicking three daisy chained distortion pedals.
Sort of equals routing an LFO or step sequencer to the resonance of a
filter. In the nineties I did a lot of chopping on studio recordings
by side chaining a gate from tape tracks running hihat, congas or
similar instruments. This trick was inspired by Daniel Lanois who I
had a chat with when he passed Sweden around the release of his first
solo album. On that occasioin he also talked about "tuning the reverb
to the songs key" which is a subtle but powerful production trick...
but another thread. Over and out....

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen - www.perboysen.com