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Looper's Delight
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Jon Wagner and I had this talk yesterday. After an amazing EDP day, we still looked at each other and said, "God, the Repeater is amazing. What will happen if ours were to break!? THE HORROR!" So where do I start? First synching. While the Repeater's output clock is dubious, a lot of devices don't seem to have an issue with it, including the EDP. Both Jon Wagner and I have done this successfully. But that's not the Repeater's strong suit. It's how it synchs to other devices. With the EDP you can imagine your loops are made of fine spun glass fiber. You can splice more or take chunks away, but try to stretch it and BLAM. Totally rigid in this respect. Now the Repeater's loops are like Silly Putty. (Who here has not experienced the joy that is pressing Silly Putty on to the Sunday comix to make Snoopy look like an Robert Crumb nightmare?!) Slow down your sequence (within reason, but pretty far) or speed it up, and the Repeater behaves like an obedient puppy. It might take a few moments for it to catch up with you, but it will stay by your side. Your pitch? Stays the same. Artifacts? Some, but totally usable and damn good compared to a lot of other devices that try to do this in real time. I never realized how I took this for granted until I put the EDP in my rig. If I've got an EDP loop going, I'd better not touch that BPM slider on my Roland MC-307 unless I'm preparing to get weird with the tempo. I must admit, not having Loop4 does prevent me from going back to my original tempo and doing a realign command. This does open up possibilities for sure. So, what else? You can time stretch and compress and pitch shift in a very fluid way. The inverse of the above is the pitch thing. The EDPs half speed and double speed pales in comparison. Sorry kids. The Repeater will run rings around any other looping device in this arena. Name the interval and you're there. Play your loops with a MIDI keyboard. I think you get an octave up and two down. Your tempo? Right on. Oh LOOK AT ME! I'm now playing my loop backwards at 80% of it's original tempo up a fifth. WEEEEEEE! And who can forget STEREO. Sure, the Repeater and EDP now cost about the same but I don't care who you are, if you plan to record music it will be played back on a stereo system. The Repeater is STEREO. Sure you can post process your loops with a stereo effect, but trust me, it isn't the same. Also, I'm not just looping guitar, I've got 1028 juicy stereo sounds that come from my synth, as well as the output of the AirFX and AirSynth. To bump those down to mono would be a damn shame. Believe me, it's one of the main reasons I haven't really hit the EDP that hard since I got it. To me this is VERY important and I don't have the cash for another one. While were on it, forget stereo, the Repeater is a multitrack device that can deal with 4 tracks, how ever you'd like to deal with them. Two stereo pairs, one stereo pair and two mono, whatever. You can take each track and "slip" it in relationship with the others, while all the time still maintaining the tempo! Really useful. Stereo Effects loop. YUM. To do what I do with the Repeater, I'd not only need another EDP, but some signal routing device like a mixer with stereo aux sends or a Switchblade router. Switchblades START at $750! That means I've spent $2050! YIPE! If you don't care about an effects loop, you can route each track to it's own output for quad looping madness. The 16 meg it comes with is nothing. OK for my grandmom's looper. Get an $80 smartmedia card and you've now got 128 meg! 8 minute loop length limit! Longest out there of any hardware looper. The end. And you still get a lot of the functionality of the EDP with things like Loop multiply, different overdub modes, undo, ect. You don't get the yummy insert modes though. This ability to splice bits onto your loop is where the Repeater lacks. I never knew I needed these until yesterday though! I'm still not sure I can even use them much, as they'd screw up the MIDI synch that's so much a part of my deal. Last, but not least, for those DJs out there that need to take bits of what they're mixing and loop it, the Repeater's Beat Detect is really good. For fun, I'll put it in beat detect mode and just play into it, changing my tempo making the Repeater CRAZY trying to find me. Oh, it's get's weird quick. All the time, I can be in Record too. OK, I'm sure there's more, but I'm tired of typing. Mark Sottilaro On Sunday, August 25, 2002, at 10:02 AM, Mark Hamburg wrote: > Sylvan Music in Santa Cruz. > > They want $629, however, which puts it within spitting distance of yet > another Echoplex and is now twice the price of a Line6 Echo Pro. > > People keep saying that one should have both. Why? > > Mark >