Re: TC Electronics D-TWO

[Dpcoffin@aol.com]

I've had about a week with a D-2 and it is impressive, but  not all that 
easy 
to get control of. OF course, it sounds wonderful, in the tc style, and 
the 
advertised features work quite easily: You can tap in a distinct rhythm 
pattern, select an exact number of repeats, up to 10,  and fine tune the 
ducking feature without much of a struggle. But for looping it's a bit 
more 
complex. You can set up a tip-ring footswitch pair to tap tempo and 
bypass, 
and the bypass can be set to work like a hold button if you're at 100% 
feedback. But what I prefer for looping with a delay line is to have a 
pair 
of control pedals, one  assigned to input level and one to feedback, and 
to 
do this, as far as I can tell so far (and I haven't actually got it 
working 
yet), I'll have to add a dedicated stereo volume pedal in front, and use a 
configurable MIDI foot controller on which I can set up a cv pedal to CC 
50...this # can't be reset on the D-2. There's a list of maybe 25-30 
control 
destinations, each with a fixed controller #, so I'm in for a long session 
on 
the floor reassigning all the already-used switches and pedals on my 
FC-200 
and their destination #s on my other gear so the pedals don't do anything 
to 
the D-2 when aimed at something else.
The Rhythm feature is cool, but has some quirks that surprise me: It's not 
a 
cross-feed delay like the rhythm feature on my current looper and favorite 
delay line, the Korg DL8000R, so it seems to not repeat  the very first 
iteration of the pattern exactly, takes one loop to settle in...or so it 
seems so far; I'll have to study this more.... Also, I'd expect a rhythm 
pattern to follow a newly tapped tempo, but as soon as you touch the tap 
tempo footswitch to change that, the unit switches out of Rhythm mode into 
straight delay. If you want to speed up or slow down an existing pattern, 
you 
have to retap it in, or dial in a new global BPM from the front. I may 
discover that I can do this with MIDI foot control, but the normally very 
knowledgeable folks in tc's tech-support area don't seem to know this 
puppy 
well enough yet to tell me how, and it ain't in the manual.
Noentheless, the D-2 is an inspiring tool, lots of fun right out of the 
box. 
I'll letya know when I get all the pieces together whether it does exactly 
what I want...like the now-discontinued DL8000R, which I highly recommend 
keeping an eye out for. It seems obvious to me that tc checked this piece 
out 
thoroughly when designing the D-2. So far I'm not sure it's clearly 
superior. 
I expect it to be, but, like I said, I haven't got it working yet!
David Coffin