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Looper's Delight
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Jon Durant wrote: > > The big issue is: is there a market out there? So far the returns on >Jam/Plex > etc have indicated not. If someone asked me if I'd be involved in a >company that > made *only* looping devices, I'd say no. Too risky. But a new >effect/processing > company with a little bit of creative vision *is* a real option. >Consider how > many people hate Digitech/Alesis/etc but still buy the stuff anyway. >Well, what > if someone new came in and answered the issues, made the right products >at the > right prices. Thought about the user for a change. Hmmm.... I have to agree with Mr. Durant here. I think the market for a dedicated looping device is rather small, but a truly interesting and flexible effects device could be a different story entirely. Off and on for the past several weeks I've been looking at products such as SuperCollider and Kyma for creative sound maipulation. Both of these products allow one virtually unlimited creativity in sound production. How about a Vortex Fractal B patch with four dual delay paths, each delay adjustable from a few millisecs to several seconds, with various lfo's to control panning, and perhaps some FM thrown in for good measure? SuperCollider is a relatively inexpensive ($300) program for power macintoshes that uses the CPU for signal processing. It can input straight from the mac's sound in ports, and send the sound right back out. The bad part is that thanks to various output buffers, there is a minimum delay from signal input to signal output, which in the few tests I've been able to do with the demo program, is a minimum of around 0.4 seconds. That is workable for doing loops, but very frustrating otherwise, particularly given its ability for tonal modifications. Another issue with SuperCollider is that it's patches are written in a relatively terse lisp dialect. This is great if you're a programmer, anything can be modifed sample by sample, but would suck if all you want to do is modify a few obvious parameters. SuperCollider does have the ability to build simple dialogs to control parameters, though. The Kyma system is just about opposite in all ways. It is *VERY* expensive, at $4500, does not have a large minimum delay (reportedly 10ms for most operations), and does have a graphic patch editor. Kyma comes with a DSP mainframe that holds 8 cards, each with a 66MHz 56K DSP chip and 3MB ram for samples. The base unit (included in the price) comes with two cards. Add a couple more cards ($600 each) and you can do some truly outrageous stuff, such as a detailed FFT analysis of the signal, modify the analysis data in the frequency domain, then resynthesize it, all in real time (but with a 0.5 sec or so delay). I doubt that even Eventide can do pitch shifting that accurately. So, Kyma is very nice, but proprietary hardware makes me nervous, what with dual CPU 250 MHz Macs coming on the scene, and, well, gosh, that price is a bit steep. Though, giving them credit, it's not that bad compared to say an Eventide 4000, and there really isn't any competition for it. The approach I'd like to take is to build a simple PCI card to provide high quality analog ins and outs with very little delay, modify SuperCollider to use that card for i/o, and build a gui patch editor for it. The selling price could easily be kept under $1000 (or less?). That doesn't include the computer, but then many folks have them anyway, and the software/audio-io card solution avoids investing in proprietary hardware. In return, you get a sound creation/manipulation platform that is utterly flexible. Someone could program it to be the ultimate analog synth, or try physical modeling, or build a guitar synth that merges the two, have bizzare arpeggiators track audio signals without midi conversion delays. And then add a second i/o card for quadraphonic sound...with quadraphonic delays, of course! Jim