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You're right about the tambourine dynamic range, Kim. What's more, tamborine is RICH in frequencies above 20 Khz, all the way to the 50 KHz range. This will get past the anti-aliasing filters, rendering them less effective. So, in addition to compressing the tambourine, heavy filtering of the highs above 15Khz (or compressing those highs) would possibly help. This is one of those special cases where higher digital sampling frequency would be of great advantage. -----Original Message----- From: Kim Flint [mailto:kflint@chromatic.com] Sent: Thursday, October 29, 1998 10:45 PM To: Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com Cc: Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com Subject: Re: echoplex or jamman? At 06:01 PM 10/29/98 -0500, Dennis W. Leas wrote: >Kim Flint wrote: >> >> Again, you have the input too high, and you are clipping the digital audio >> path. Set the input level correctly on the Echoplex, and you won't have this >> problem. Use the tambourine as a reference signal, and refer to your >ears >> before the Level LED. When the tambourine sounds fine in a loop, you are set. > >As always, I appreciate your response, Kim. But have you tried a real tambourine? I >don't have problems with real cymbals and drums. I definitely have problems with the >tambourine and ting-sha. When I turn the gain down enough for the tambourine everything >else is far too low. I'm using a Shure SM-57 and a Tascam 1024 mixer. I have the EDP >plumbed into the AUX 1 and returning to a line-level channel. I am especially interested >in your response to trying a real tambourine. > ah, I think what you are encountering is that the natural dynamic range of the tambourine is so very wide. I guess that's a problem that you have to deal with when using percussion instruments electronically. I don't know exactly what the tambourine response is, but I've seen snare drum transients measured over 140dB! I'd guess a tambourine would be similar or greater. A 140dB transient is more than any digital gear can manage, so the question is always going to be how badly does it fail to handle this. The echoplex, unfotunately, sounds crappy when it clips, so using some compression to tame the large attacks a little is probably a good idea. You probably don't need to compress everything though, just the tambourine and ting-sha since those have a problem. That will probably help them sound better in other gear too, although it's likely not as dramatic. The Echoplex uses a VCA to do quick analog cross-fades when you start and end loop recording, which helps prevent pops at the seam between beginning and end of the loop. This works great and solves a problem that all the other loopers seem to suffer from, but this same part sounds horrible when it clips. So it's a tradeoff there, I guess. In other gear you'd probably just be clipping opamps somewhere, which won't be so bad but not great either. I have used tambourine sounds, but they were samples or straight off a CD. So they were already compressed a bit in comparison to a live version. They sounded fine in the Echoplex, I didn't have any trouble with them as long as the input level was set correctly. kim ________________________________________________________ Kim Flint, MTS 408-752-9284 Chromatic Research kflint@chromatic.com http://www.chromatic.com