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Looper's Delight
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At 4:01 AM -0300 5/18/00, Matthias Grob wrote: > >great! you are full of computers... it was an accident, honest :-) and I really do have these recurring "setting up equipment in front of an audience" dreams. Maybe I should just accept it and call it performance art. Didn't Fripp do something like that when he was learning how to use the DSP4000? <duck> <moreflamebait> Anyway, I have lost track of the difference between rack mount digital audio devices and computers. My reverb, tape recorder and harmonizer all crash and have to be rebooted sometimes, plus many new mixers, multitrack recorders and even reverbs take so long to turn on there must be Windows inside. Moreover, if I refrain from using a computer for anything but very specific music applications, it runs reliably enough. In fact it works better than using a tape splicer to open mail envelopes, know what I mean? </moreflamebait> >I did not quite understand whether you rebuild the loops using the >external looper again (which is it?) or by mounting loops in the >mltitrack soft. Both. Rebuilding through an external looper is useful if there is one or two clams which snuck into an otherwise happy loop. Putting up recorded loops in multitrack software, and looping the loops, or rearranging fragments of them is often more interesting however, because it is like improvising in the recording environment-- you quickly stumble upon serendipitous surprises and are always working with something fresh. Presentation not representation and all that. >What do you mean by "my own looping stuff"? Well, for a long time I have been keeping a haphazard journal, designing an instrument to help break down the barriers between playing, composing, recording, sampling, editing and mixing. I find these distinctions highly arbitrary and for the most part side effects of technological habits. About three years ago I "got it" that personal computers were fast enough to allow mere mortals to fool around with DSP coding, without having to worry *too much* about optimization and more arcane programming issues. I started writing a looper in James McCartney's SuperCollider, then migrated to Cycling74's Max/MSP since I happened to live down the street from the UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). A lot of nice people at CNMAT have done wonders with Max and have been an inspiration to me. So, "My own looping stuff" is a rather huge Max/MSP patch that I have mentioned here a few times before, plus a bunch of more traditional outboard gear and a digital mixer under MIDI footpedal control. I certainly appreciate boxes like the EDP but for my own purposes, I want a lot more flexibility in transforming loops on the fly, while continuing to play into them. "Live editing" is probably a better description of what I am trying to do than looping, not that I do not enjoy simple repetition and layering. I will probably end up giving this stuff away since I am a terrible entrepreneur, but not until it works the way I want it to. Since I am unfortunately way too busy with a day job and a family to devote a lot of time to the project, it could be another year. But it is getting there slowly but surely. If anyone knows how to sell un-copy-protected software for a very fair price without losing more money on marketing than you make giving it away, let me know! I don't need to make money on it, it is a labor of love, but I cannot afford to provide fair tech support for free. -Alex S.