hi man,
thanks for this detailed, warm and Humorous reply.
You know one terrible thing, I had my holy grail looper Once in
awhile, it was called the Electrix repeater. It grew old and
started being hard to use because of its switches that use some
kind of Silicon underneath, that gets squashed after a few years
of use, furthermore when you bought it second-hand which is my
case. Nevertheless, I decided I would come back to it after all my
research for new stuff that didn't meet my needs. Only to find out
the machine was down. It now makes an awful and loud static noise
when turned on, and the display is blank.
This was definitely the best looper in the world ever made as far
as I'm concerned. Of course, it's a bit old-fashioned nowadays, it
uses CFC cards which I don't even know if they are still on sale,
and it has a few flaws like the fact that when you run direct
signal through it, the signal is delayed by a few milliseconds, I
would say about 20, which forces me to use a mixer to mix dry and
loop, which I didn't want to do at first.
From what I know the Electrix company is dead, Repeter 2 wich
Promised to be even better than 1 never made it, and am now
looking for the schematics to get it serviced in France. I just
dropped a line to a company called Condor electronics that can
still service this machine, and I hope they'll send me the service
manual, because shipping it to the USA would be Ridiculously
expensive I imagine.
Still looking at new gear though, who knows…,
Best regards,
JPR
http://www.jprykiel.com
http://soundcloud.com/ryksounet
http://twitter.com/ryksounet
http://facebook.com/jeanphilipperykiel
Le 17/02/2017 à 04:47, DogFaced Boy a
écrit :
The Infinity looper from Pigtronix lets you specify
multiplications of the first loop length, 2, 3,4 and 6 times
longer. I don't know whether it's easy or hard for a
visually-impaired person; I am totally IN AWE of anyone who can
even breathe and... remember to beat their heart and stuff, even
eat in that state, much less record music? Much of the settings
on the Infinity are soft little rubber buttons which move small
and not-too-bright lights around to indicate status, I have to
use a flashlight and I'm not impaired (not THATaways...) There
isn't like a positive "STOP" feeling or click from the buttons.
For my own self, I have become very wary of "moving out the old,
in with the new" regarding musical equipment for that very
reason you mention. It sometimes seems like some of my favorite,
easiest functions get "improved" right outta the newest bestest
improved versions of stuff. DON'T DUMP TILL YOU KNOW - I've had
many horses leave the barn before I figured that one up! And for
my own stuff again, I have just bit the bullet and acknowledged
that sometimes going back and forth from one machine to another
is a LOT easier mentally for me than trying to take full
advantage of the trickery built inside a single,
multi-multi-multi-finction device. It ABSOLUTELY means a higher
buildup of noise, I don't "quantize" well so sometimes it's real
hard to get myself all coordinated, and I am surely NOT "taking
advantage" of all the hoopla and trickery I paid for - BUT IT
WORKS.
Once I accept a certain level of bone-headedness as fundamental,
I can be smarter... like one dumb easy trick is that rather than
trying to coordinate with some click or metronome TRACK, just
use an entirely external, $8 metronome that NEVER does get
recorded onto anything. I'm also using free recording software
"Audacity" as my end-of-the-line storage, whether temporary or
permanent. While I'm sure self-sufficiency is a touchstone for
you, I would bet that if you can find someone familiar with that
or Ableton etc., they could set up some sort of basic, maybe
eight or ten command interface that would at least let you save
EVERYTHING, even if it requires more sorting out later.
I am guessing, but is it easier for you to have MORE buttons
that each do a lot and LESS jumping here and there to get
combinations of functions? Like a MIDI switching device can be
programmed to execute a set of software AND even some hardware
responses, poke ONE button and it does overdub/save, another
button and it does replace/save and on and on. The difficulty
lies in deciding which functions are most useful and getting
someone to install that, not whether it can be done. For that
matter Dave Koltai at Pigtronix is quite a problem-solver, AND
their devices are all software upgradable via USB. If you and he
figured out a list of cool useful command combinations he might
find that to be very useful for a lot of other people... I play
steel guitar and very shortly after I e-mailed Pigtronix my
typical "steel guitarists got no frets to save us, we CAN'T stop
and LOOK for buttons OR footswitches!" bitchy rant, he
personally got back to me, figured out how to separate the up
from the down and built me a nifty little footswitcher de-luxe
that fixed many things. A bit of which then showed up as
product. I STILL, to this day, when I see a box with several
footswitches and lots of what are clearly HAND-switches, I'm
like... "Well, DUH. What IS this fucking thing supposed to BE?"
It is beneath my DIGNITY to go crawling around on the floor
while creating my ART! Ummm, well actually, I'm 59 years old
with bad discs, and once I'm down there the odds of getting back
up anytime soon are diminishing almost weekly, it seems. Might
be worth dropping him a line, if any of this rings a bell.
