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Looper's Delight
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>Loopers are in their infancy when compared to the development of the grand
>piano or a guitar, or many other fine instruments. We should not be
>satisfied that the ergonomics of looping instruments have been well solved
>or worked out. We do have a long way to go!
>
>That may be an important role for our little group in the looping
>universe.
>How should this instrument work ergonomically? How can we make it better?
>You have the ears of the most progressive designers in the field present
>on
>this list, tell us what you think!
>
>And as technology allows us more possibilites, the interface design
>becomes
>even more challenging. Many ideas for what the next generation of loopers
>should do have been proposed here. How will the musician control these
>features? What will make them intuitive and easy to use expressively, like
>guitars and pianos and saxophones?
This reminds me of the "alternate synth controller" thread that pops up
in the keyboard world every now and then. It usually starts with someone
bemoaning the fact that the Most Powerful Sound Generating Device Known
To Man is triggered by roughly the same interface that Mozart used on a
harpsichord.
"Surely there have been advances in controller/interface technology in
the last few centuries!", says the frustrated synthesist, "Why just the
other night I was thinking that if I could control the vibrato of each
individual voice by moving my toes along a vertical axis, I would FINALLY
BE ABLE TO GET SOME MUSIC MADE! Naturally, this addition alone would not
be nearly enough to allow me to express my considerable talent, I also
wish to be able to control the filter sweep my moving my toes along the
horizontal axis. Nay, even this would not be enough to convey the worlds
of sound that are trapped within my head--I want to be able to
dynamically assign the horizontal and vertical movement of each of my ten
toes (if only I had more!) to a different paramenter, for each patch, as
needed. I DEMAND that all the International MIDI Committee immediately
adopt and standardize this Ten-Toe Controller (10TC) as a required
addition to all future keyboards and effects processors. P.S. I wish to
pay no more than $24.99 for this controller."
Given that there's a bit of hyperbole involved in the above example, but
it took forever for aftertouch to become fairly common. And there was
one keyboard which would would read wiggling the keys from side to side,
so that you could apply vibrato with a guitaristic motion.
As far as making looping device interfaces more ergonomic, I'd rather
that money be spent on fixing the feature set, rather then devising some
sort of cuddly accordian-style interface. Every dollar spent on, say, a
large-LCD display on the front of the unit or physical dials to control
parameters is a dollar less spent on developing the software/hardware.
In addition, I think that looping rigs tend to be more esoteric than the
average musician, who only sends audio in one direction. I remember a
long-lived thread on MIDI foot-controller implementation for the Big Two,
and there didn't seem to be a consensus on what people wanted out of it.
If Lexicon or Oberheim has to try and second guess all the unusual,
one-of-a-kind rigs that the next generation of loopers are going to be
installed into (whoops--scratch Lex, they already decided that looping
was too much work for not enough payback), we'll never see anything.
I don't want to sound like I'm advocating a position of "everything's
great--we should all be so grateful for the crumbs we've been thrown". I
think that any improvements on the interface front are going to come from
specific solutions to specific problems, not from saying "I wish
everything were more flexible and easier to use!". Think of something
like the Parson's-White B-bender or the Floyd Rose tailpiece, they were
solutions to clearly identified problems ("How can I play this
three-handed lick with two hands?" and "How can I yank on my vibrato bar
all night without going out of tune?"). Granted, they don't represent a
change in the guitar interface, but as we move out of the realm of
physical tone generators and into the more hypothetical realm of digital
audio manipulation, the ground is uncharted.
Travis Hartnett