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At 12:46 AM -0500 1/26/98, ENAT21213 wrote: >Hello everyone, > >Thanks to Kim for his time and patience with me. > >How about if the echoplex pedalboard was designed to contain 9 extra >buttons >that would access loops 1 thru 9.I believe this would solve this tap up or >down to get to a desired loop problem. I'd really like to encourage you to try the way the echoplex interface does work, first. The tapping "problem" really isn't a problem at all when you are familiar with how it works. In some respects, it actually turns out to be far more powerful than the simple triggering method you are using now. And it uses a lot less stage area than you are currently using, which was a design goal for it. The whole point of that part of the interface design is to allow easy and reasonably fast access to any loop while only requiring one extra button instead of nine, basically to take care of people with situations like yours. This is possible because we can take advantage of the other switches, briefly giving them new functions when the user wants to switch loops. With the "confirm" mode on, you don't listen to the loops you don't want, you just go directly to the one you do. In my experience, I usually know what loop I'm going to in advance of when I actually need to switch, and I can usually have it ready to jump there in less than a second without really needing to concentrate on it much. Personally, I find this much better than having a whole other pedal taking up space in front of me, and I find it works just as well. The thing that makes it incredibly useable, which you can't do with simple triggering, is I can dictate what happens when I jump to the new loop. In addition to just playing the new loop, I can switch and have it immediately recording something new, or overdubbing onto an existing loop, or copying the loop I left into the new one while I add new things to it, or just copy the length of the previous one. All of this I can control very quickly, with a minimum of tapping. We did spend a huge amount of time thinking about this, trying it out, and bouncing the ideas of a lot of other musicians to make sure it would come out nicely. Again, I encourage you to first try the way it DOES work rather than trying to force it into a less useful model, and then make up your mind. >You could have buttons 1 thru 9 on the >top row and the record,undo ect. buttons on the bottom row(or vice >versa)of >the pedalboard.This would save alot of stage space.I really would love to >get >an echoplex but its looking like I will have to spend around $885 >bucks(echoplex,pedalboard and a$100 for a midi pedal that will work) to >get >the echoplex to work for me the way I need it to. Well thanks for the suggestion, we do appreciate them and much of what we do is derived from feedback we get from users. This would make the pedal significantly larger and more expensive, which most people would not like very much. It also would not be compatible with the existing echoplex hardware and require some special cable. And unfortunately, Aurisis is a very small operation, and I'm afraid we simply don't have resources to devote towards making every old thing and every special circumstance work. Especially something that has a readily available solution and is only interesting to a small number of users. And since 99.999% of people who trigger loops do so with midi note commands sent to a sampler, there's not much motivation for us to break out of that midi interface model for something more limited than what we have. (the jamman is the only device I'm aware of that doesn't trigger loops in this way.) We would much prefer to spend our limited time and money developing new features that we hope people will find interesting, rather than endlessly testing and adjusting what we've got to make sure it works with everything that was made in the last 15 years! If you are really into triggering loops, I'd suggest you follow the crowd and find some way to send midi-note commands. That way you will not only be able to trigger loops on the echoplex, but other loop oriented devices you may decide to use, like samplers and such. You'll have a lot more versatility and options if you have more midi commands at your disposal, and if you are going to follow this direction, you will probably want to make this change at some point anyway. There are many controller devices you could choose from: keyboards, drum triggers, more sophisticated midi pedals, etc. As some consolation, the echoplex also supports use of continuous controller messages for loop triggering, in addition to its use of midi notes. >Or mabey you and Oberheim >could design a program change friendly echoplex?Now this would be cool >then I >could use my ancient ada midi pedals.Till then I gess I'l keep looping >with my >jamman. An Echoplex controlled by program change messages from two ADA pedals like you have it would not be able to do a lot of it's functions. An Echoplex controlled by a single simple program change pedal (like the DMC Ground Control) would do even less. Even worse to me, the interface which makes the Loop software elegant and simple to use disappears and it becomes much less musically intuitive. You really wouldn't have much reason to upgrade this setup to an Echoplex, since you wouldn't have access to many of the interesting advanced features in Loop and the musicality that people seem to enjoy so much would be less available. If we released a version of Loop that somehow made every feature in your Echoplex controllable by program change messages, you would need to add one or two more ADA pedals to use it! And that would be so impossible to use that you'd hardly find it satisfying. On the other hand, if you were to learn to use the echoplex's carefully designed pedal (or get one of several midi pedal that are capable of emulating it, or even build your own plex pedal, it's not hard) you would have one less pedal on stage than you do now and a much nicer musical experience.... This is a frustrating situation to deal with, because some people using looping devices have unfortunately been given the expectation that looping can be controlled via midi in a ridiculously simple fashion. As more powerful looping devices become available, this approach breaks down very quickly. What happens when there are 32 or 64 loops available instead of 9? And many more functions to use on them? And 128 different patches to select between? Do you still want to control that completely with a single midi command? It'll be impossible! Now, if you were to buy any synthesizer, or a sampler, or recording system with midi-based transport control, or even a very simple drum machine, you would never assume that it could be totally controlled by just midi program change messages. So why would you expect the echoplex or any other looping device to operate that way? Midi is a sort of language, and when you use a device that can only speak a very small subset of the words you have to accept that you can only communicate to other devices in a very limited fashion. It's as if someone were to open up your vocabulary and remove everything but the prepositions. No nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or even gerunds. Your ability to communicate with the world would then be impossibly limited, and you would not be able to do most of the things you can normally do. You wouldn't even be able to form thoughts about what you might do. That's the sort of box you would stick your echoplex in if you limit it completely to midi program change....I find that appalling, and would rather not disappoint people with something like that, which would be way below our standards for a good interface. That is why I remain unconvinced about the whole idea. (That and my opinion that this use would violate the midi standard's definition of program change.) My opinion is that we would rather not introduce it at all if it will just cause more inconsistencies and problems later. In this case, it will already cause a lot of conflicts with other features likely to be in the next versions of Loop based products. And for the versions after that, we would just have to remove it again, which would just be a bigger hassle than never introducing it in the first place. Our goal is to do what we can now to maintain consistency with the future, so that we don't end up with even worse legacy problems down the road. In this case, we will most probably be reserving midi program change for it's intended purpose of changing programs. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@annihilist.com | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html http://www.annihilist.com/ | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com