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Looper's Delight
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Dear Loopers, My name is Andrew Chaikin. I am a vocalist / throat singer / vocal percussionist (i.e., beatboxer) based in San Francisco. After performing with various artists in the past few years who are integrating looping into their live work (Michael Manring, Danny Heines, Mixtape From Mars, Realistic, etc.), I'm crafting a solo project based entirely around live looping of voice. So I'm overjoyed to have found this list, and to be searching the copious archives, educating myself about the thriving Live Looping movement. Here's a short summary of what I'd like to do; I'd be most appreciative of any advice you can give. I want to loop and multitrack my voice live on stage: lay down a beat, then a vocal bass line, harmony parts, sing lead over it, etc. Let's say 8 looped tracks might be going at once. I want the ability to bring any track (or a group of tracks) in or out, and to have fader volume control on each individual track. I want to be able to switch between different loops on any given track or group of tracks (e.g., A-section to B-section and back). Real-time quantization presumably becomes crucial in managing this multitracked morass. I'd operate the looping gear with a MIDI foot controller and (I assume) manage the volume of each track via faders on my audio interface. My research has turned up a few possible approaches, each with their own pros and cons: Live by Ableton, the Echoplex, and Kyma + LCK. Ableton's Live comes very close to what I'm looking for. You get true multitracking, realtime quantization, dedicated effects for each track, and rudimentary but effective MIDI accessibility. But some of the most basic hardware-looper functions seem to be missing -- for example, rather than letting you quantize everything off of the tempo/length of your first live loop, it requires you to work off of a preset BPM. (Feel free to correct me if I've got this wrong.) This means I'd have to have Live's metronome coming through a monitor or headphones onstage. And all the standard laptop-looper worries apply: latency, issues of CPU and hard-drive speed, what-if-it- crashes-on-stage, etc. The Echoplex: I salivate over some of the things that the EDP+ with LoopIV can do -- 8th-quantization, Loop Dividing, Replace, etc. It would allow me to whip up some very sophisticated MIDI-controlled arrangements. But as far as I can tell, the EDP wouldn't give me true multitracking, unless I chained a bunch of them together at $800 a pop. (Once again, correct me if I have this wrong.) I guess I could base my arrangements around very canny use of Overdub, Undo, Multiply, Loop Copy, Next Loop, etc., but it'd be a stretch, I think. Symbolic Sound's Kyma system -- a software package controlling a dedicated hardware audio processor -- looks incredibly powerful, and with Green Tea's Looper Construction Kit add-on, seems like a live-looper's dream. But at $3500 for the basic system (not including the cost of the laptop, of course), it ain't cheap. Right now I'm leaning towards Ableton's Live. Are there any approaches that I've missed? Or might I just have to wait a year or two for the multitrack live-looping setup of my dreams? Thanks in advance for your advice, Andrew Chaikin, aka Z-ROX andrew@biggerbread.com (415) 929-8822 http://biggerbread.com | http://z-rox.com