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RE: Using computers as a Live Looper - software alternatives
I'm
new to new looping myself, and am oriented towards software because I
work as a software developer, and not necessarily because it's better for
looping. I agree with all the previously mentioned limits of Ableton Live. That
said, I like the Live paradigm because I'm oriented mostly towards looping more
traditional music elements that I play/record live along with live percussion
and vocals. Ableton's clip editing features are nice (for me at least) to
have visible in an intuitive way. ie you can see measure/beat counts and easily
change loop durations and various envelopes on the fly, while a loop is playing.
You can also have loops fire without syncing to the project tempo/beat. Another
nice feature is the "scene" concept, in which multiple loops are designated to
start/stop at the same time. It's very easy to arrange scenes on the fly and
keep only some loops going from scene to scene while you add new
ones.
Ableton's got good realtime time-stretching (ie pitch invariant) which is
great for what I'm working on. I don't know one way or the other if hardware
loopers/repeaters do time-stretching.
I just
found out about a cool VST slicing/re-mixing plug-in that's really great:
SupaTrigga (http://www.smartelectronix.com/~bram/)
It slices up a loop and gives you several parameters for automatically
remixing the loop on the fly with random variations. It'll reverse slices,
silence them, slow them down, etc. Great with Ableton.
You
can simulate overdubbing by switching and recording on different tracks in
Ableton live, although the midi controller mappings are not currently designed
efficiently for this. The important functions for live looping on each track,
namely arm/disarm, trigger/launch, stop and track-select, all have to be set
_independently_ for each track. So, you'd need a separate midi controll event
for each track's arm/disarm, etc. For working with 10 tracks, you need at least
30 controllers to be effective. Awkward for foot controllers! I have two ideas
for a workaround: 1) my Yamaha MFC10 controller has a x10 button that puts
all subsequent footswitch presses into another "bank" of sorts. I
could assign the same footswitches to controllers on different channels and
effectively switch between Ableton tracks by using the x10 switch to change
controller banks on the foot controller. 2) Write a little midi input mapper
that will map controller events to different channels, with the destination
channel switchable via controller. So I'd have a footswitch to change the mapped
channel and setup Ableton to responsd to different channel for each track. If
you'd like more details let me know. Anyone have any other
ideas?
Still,
I'd be happy to find something more versatile with Live. Something that allows
easier overdubbing, better midi controller support. I looked a little at
Reaktor, and the NI people sent me this link on using Reaktor for live looping
(haven't read it yet myself):
http://www.nativeinstruments.de/page.php?id=r3tutlive_us
Cheers,
Michael
Stauffer
michael@circular-logic.com
www.circular-logic.com
Dear Per,
THANKS a lot for your quite informative answer. Its really
interesting to hear various views and experiences, so I hope my posting
gets some other quality responses.
A couple questions:
>All software lack "overdub layering sound-on-sound into
a
>spinning loop" features.
The really promising one seems to be Ambiloop:
Unfortunately, I have an old sound card for my desktop, so the latency is
too slow to rythmic stuff. Also I have to do some MIDI mapping so I can
control it without using my hands. This software is still developing,
and seems that we should really encourage the developers!
However, I think many of the software like Reaktor basically let you
build your own instruments, and so developing looping applications should be
possible. People seem to have done this with KYMA, but that software
requires expensive external hardware to run.
>"to cut in/out different note values to create rhythms"
What do you mean by that?
>Ableton Live is pretty close, but it is still lacking both
"overdub/layering into a loop" and >"cutting note value slices out of/into
a loop".
So Ableton will let you capture the live audio and loop it (live), but
then not overdub onto it? If not, can you just keep adding new tracks on
the fly?
Thanks again!
Gregory
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