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Looper's Delight
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At 05:05 AM 1/5/99 -0800, you wrote: >Fellow Loopers, > >Do any of you use the acid software? How do you like it? >Dan I like it a great deal. I got Acid Music and Acid DJ from Best Buy for about $110. You need the Acid Music to get the unlimited tracks. DJ has more interesting techno wave files than Music though. It has Acid Jazz, Dance, Industrial, and House (I've been told by some techno enthusiasts that the house waves not truly house style sounds, but I don't know). I've had a lot of fun with it so far, but after making 6 songs, I've been trying to find ways to make some of the loops fit better and sound less repetitive. It sounds good to have some repetition for a while in a song but you have to change it more often so you can keep the listener paying attention to the work (IMHO anyway). I've made my own waves as well as taken a lot of free ones off the web to play with (check www.loopmagazine.com for 3 links to web pages that have free sample libraries). Some problems I've encountered are getting the bpm adjusted properly, getting a 4/4 measure out of the loop, and making sure the loop begins and ends such that it sounds continuous. What I am having problems with using Acid is trying to whip up a drum n' bass tune. Most of the drum n' bass CD's I listen to have several different variations of a similar drum beat. You can't just lay down one drum loop from the DJ cd and then lay down another one at another point, you have to have fills and the drum n' bass beat has a certain feel to it that cancels out a lot of the beats on the cd. Obviously this can't be done with Acid alone (at least not for me, the novice). So I've been using this drum machine to generate a break-beat loop, and then make several changes to it as the tune grooves, attempting to give it the energy that a drum n' bass song needs. You also need to get some good ambient and wah effect loops, as well as some interesting bass melodies. I've had problems finding ambient loops on the web (but I hear it's trivial to make your own. I even made a few with the qy90). And still there are problems! I have a Yamaha qy90 and it just doesn't have enough drums in it to do the deed! Argh. I also have a Roland SH-101 I'm using for some heavy bass and to make some noise. I also have a guitar, 4-track recorder, digitech effects processor, and a wah peddle, which should come in handy, since I could feed a loop from the sound card, through the wah peddle, to a 4-track recorder and then play the wahhed loop off the 4-track back into the sound card. A lot of trouble, but I gotsta have that drum n' bass feel... I guess what I really need is an easy to use drum machine that's also cheap. It's weird, ever since I jumped into this hobby I always want to buy more gear...argh... Anybody have any advice for my troubles? Thanks, JM