Re: Early bird loopers with Live?

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:07 AM, David Hayes <stringfling@gmail.com> wrote:
>> use Looper as a silent dummy
>> in order to secure a stable tempo pick-up, and then  duplicate the same
>> external MIDI events used for Looper to target also a good third-party
>> looping plug-in as Mobius

> Generally speaking would this Live 8 / Mobius solution be the closest 
>thing
> possible (so far) to the EDP way of working but with the advantages of
> Ableton and tempo pick-up?

Maybe. That depends on which of the EDP functions you regard most
being "the EDP way of looping". One point in my testing was to see if
Live 8 works well when following the tempo set by the first loop you
create - as opposed to another way of looping where you have a "click
track" of a (host) tempo that the looper (and you) has to follow.

What I found yesterday night, when doing a quick check again, was that
Live 8 does indeed follow MIDI Clock well. So the workaround with a
dummy Live Looper to set the tempo for Live is not necessary. I simply
skipped over using Live's Looper and used Mobius VST instead and set
Mobius to send out MIDI Clock into OS X IAC bus, which I set Live to
use as "sync input". With earlier versions of Live I've had problems
with this (on both Windows and Mac) but yesterday it seemed to sync
well. I inserted tremolo effects set to sharp square waves onsome
Mobius tracks and the music and tremolo effect seemed to go along
well.

Another really nice thing with Mobius VST in Live is that you can
bring out all Mobius tracks over separate Live mixer channels and
treat them properly for the best sound (in my case that means adding
plug-ins for Low Cut and Compression to each channel, since I do a lot
of Rate Shift wobbling in Mobius that may sometimes result in bass
frequencies too low for the system to handle). So you get a really
good sound when filling up many Mobius tracks with parallel loops.

>> being too busy rehearsing live looping with another software setup.

> Just wondering what that would be and why you chose it...

Mainstage hosting Mobius AU. I chose it for three reasons:

1) I like the sound of the audio effect plug-ins.
2) It lets me keep at least 128 instantly available effect patches to
play through, and those not in use do not tax the CPU at all.
3) I like the huge palette of great sounding virtual MIDI instruments.

In fact, before Apple released Mainstage I had built me a looping rig
of Plogue Bidule hosting Mobius that was precisely what Mainstage
appeared to be. So it was a no-brainer to leave Bidule for Mainstage
and start making music right away, as opposed to having to do a lot of
programming of your tools to set them up.

Per