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Looper's Delight
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Viz a vis, a cheap solution to breakbeat creation for live looping: One really cool thing you can do (especially on a PC with the fabulous FRUITY LOOPS PRO which, in my humble opinion is the best drum machine in the world and just about to get way better........watch for next month's COMPUTER MUSIC magazine from the UK for a cover article covering it) is to program really cool drumbeats on a home computer and then burn them to a CD. Most mixing boards have stereo ins and it is really cheap to buy a walkman styled portable CD player these days. You can either resample the grooves onto your sampler of just play to the tracks (make sure that you have at least ten minutes per groove recorded so you don't run out during a long performance) if you are not planning to either loop or retrigger. the degree of sophistication that you can get with a program like Fruity Loops Pro is so much more vast and FAST!!!! than you can with a hardware drum machine. also, unless you have midi syncability with an EDP, a REPEATER or an old JAMPERSON you will have to rely on your own rhythmic sense for retriggering anyway. a lot of people shy away from this approach but I find it can be very effective in a live performance to use prerecorded all original drum programming on a burned CD at a fraction of the cost of either a dedicated hardware drum maching or a very expensive laptop*. Besides, with programs like Fruity Loops and the cool VST drum machines (and even REASON) you don't have to take a whole load of processing and filtering gear with you to a gig to get a sophisticated and 'breathing' drum track live. try it..............you'll like it. When I get back from my summer tour of Europe and the British Isles in August, I'll post a longer post on how to program more realistic drum computer programming (even if you are an e-bow wielding ambient guitarist who is rhythmicall challenged..........LOL!) using Fruity Loops if there is enough interest later, Rick Walker www.looppool.info *(and hey, while we are at it, why does the laptop world lag so damned far behind the desktop computer world in the musical realm? Inexpensive stereo firewire solutions for live laptop recording are non-existent so far, though there is rumour of a $400 M-Audio stereo firewire box coming out at the end of March).