Re: RECOMMENDATIONS for EFFECTS PROCESSING on upcoming tour

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 7:16 PM, andy butler <akbutler@tiscali.co.uk> 
wrote:
>
>
> Rick Walker wrote:

>
>> 3)  the ability to use VST plugins in any chain I'd like to
>>   a)  be in front of my LP-1 and
>>   b)  be after my LP-1
>
> that's a latency nightmare.
> In Bidule, no problem to route signal out to LP1 on another.
> But as Per points out, that's an extra trip out of the pc and back again,
> so that's double latency.


It is feasible though, if you make sure the signal is not heard while
in its latency afflicted stages and then you set up the looper to
compensate for that latency.

Before Mobius AU was available I ran MainStage and Mobius as two
separate, standalone, applications on my OSX MacBook. Audio was sent
from MainStage (fx treatments)  into two stereo mixes, one going to
the house PA and one going out a second pair of sound card outputs to
enter a physical cable loop-back fix that brought it back into a
separate stereo input on the sound card that was chosen by Mobius as
where to fetch its input to be looped. Then Mobius was set to output
to the same stereo output as MainStage - and of course no input audio
monitored through Mobius, just loops sent out.

Now, this physical loop-back fix gave a horrendous latency to the
audio coming into Mobius, but since only looped audio were output I
was able to dial in the rather fat figure to compensate for that. The
timing was dead on when beat boxing or playing timing critical funky
stuff. And since the loopback was physical (not SoundFlower or Jack
router) the latency was fixed, i.e. did not vary depending on what
software processes are happening on the machine at a given moment. In
my experience this was one of the most stable looping rigs I've used,
way more stable feel to it than my old EDP/Repeater combo (also
talking beat sync fx, tempo change etc).

The reason I left this rig is that I like the option to treat a summed
output of my live playing signal and looper output by a multi band
compressor followed by a limiter. That is possible when having the
looper (Mobius) hosted on a send bus of MainStage.

It may look like I'm changing my setup, but in fact I am not. This all
MainStage rig takes me back to the setup I had in Santa Cruz at Y2K6.
Same processing but now done by better software - and no need to bring
an extra hardware compressor for the main PA output. I had built the
Y2K6 rig in Bidule under Windows XP, but when Apple released MainStage
I found that it was almost exactly my Bidule/XP rig! But there were no
good looper available as AU plug-in so I had to wait until just a
month ago until it was technically possible to recreate my 2006 rig
with the good sounding and CPU efficient Logic plug-ins.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com