Re: Looping, on stage, a 2 minute song part by part?

[Andrew Pask <andrew@kaleidacousticon.com>]

> I have a performance in a few weeks, where I would love to be able to
> perform a piece for 5 guitars, one part at a time.
> 
> The piece is about 2 minutes long... and with all the parts in place I
> would be looping at least 8 minutes worth of music, possibly 10.
> 
> Any advice? Hardware vs. Software?


Wow. Not wishing to be the wet blanket _too_ much, but that is asking quite
a lot, especially for a few weeks.

This sort of thing  would be difficult enough to do in a studio, let alone 
a
live performance, and I think that the main problem, even if you could 
solve
all the technical gear issues would be one of synchronisation between the
recorded parts - not ending up with a big mess.Any deviation from strict
time would be virtually impossible to play tightly with on the next pass.

So, with the caveat out of the way....

I think you'd need a hard disk recorder or some sort. I don't know of any
smaller box with 10 minutes of sample time on five different tracks.

My vote for the easiest way to do it solo would be a Mac, a really nice
soundcard, and a custom patch in Max/Msp, actually this would be simple to
setup in Max - let me know if you have access to this sort of gear and I'll
knock up a patch for you which you can use with the Max runtime for free.

If you had an assistant you would be able to do it with any Hard Disk
recording app on any old computer, as long as you had a nice audio
interface. Your assistant could enable a track for recording, then at the
end of a "take" you could pause slightly while s/he enabled another track
and started out again. If you are new to performing and operating computers
at the same time, this would be the way to go.

Apart from that you would need some really nice monitors placed close to 
you
to mimic the sound of a guitar group, and probably a little gating on the
input signal so you didn't end up with 5 channels of track 1, 4 of track 2,
etc.

Could be pretty interesting...... What style is the music?


Cheers


A