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Looper's Delight
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On May 14, 2005, at 23:36, Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill wrote: > I'm currently reflecting the possibility of doing looping-related > performance in a speaker configuration with more than two channels. 8< 8< 8< 8< 8< ......... Thank you for bringing up this highly interesting topic! Jeff's notes were also interesting reading. This week it was made clear that I will be making two surround recordings this year and this trigged my twenty year old dream of "a multi channel live performance system" into spin-around mode. In the eighties we only had digital delays to create delay bounces between PA speakers to make sound "frog jump" around the room. Today there are so many more interesting tools available. As Jeff said, you can either simply place sound in the surround field or you can set up a system that moves sound. The first approached I tried once in the nineties when scoring a four screen art movie with four channel music. I was using Logic and created Vector Objects to place audio channels between the four speakers. Logic's Vector Objects is just like a X-Y axis graf and the perfect object to manipulate with a joystick (4 parameteres instantly available). But the things I'm about to start investigating now is not 5.1 mixing or similar but a way to construct dynamic effect processing in a surround context. Here looping is essential. I will start by using Live 4, that I have already tested for ordinary stereo looping. What I'm doing right now, in stereo, is to record/overdub into two looper plug-ins at the same time. I guess the same technique can be used to record into four instances of a looper plug-in. The challenge, however, is to make something musical with it, i.e. keeping the set- up so simple that you can still play it fluently without having to plan or compose too much. Here are some ideas: 1. Delay looping. Typically layering sound into loops while controlling feedback (and sometimes as well pitch transpose the loop). To keep it simple I like to record into all loopers simultaneously while keeping them synced but of different lengths. This sounds very big in stereo and must be massive as a quadrophonic texture. 2. Doing the above but with the added option to also record into only one loop at the time. 3. Dynamically Moving Surround Sound. I see this as a different concept than 1 and 2, but also complementary. Instead of creating many sound sources in the surround field you use only one or two sound sources but work more with techniques to move the sound between positions. The easiest example is setting up a slap echo and have each echo bounce go to a different speaker. You may think about many other applications, like for example using a midi expression pedal to rotate the sound source. Or you can use a sequencer to send placement data to a channel. 4. Creating BIG Spaces. Wouldn't it be possible with let's say four surround speakers to create an appeared room that is much bigger than the actual area within the speaker field? When creating a four channel mix I experimented with reverb returns going out into all four speakers and was thrilled by the experience. I think my choice for surround looping is to use mainly software. I have a decent eight output sound card that may also work as patch-bay to bring my Echoplex into the software. EDP sound will arrive some 12 milliseconds late, due to AD latency, but I've never had a problem with that. But I'm not planning to use my laptop because it's too weak (a 1,25 GB Apple Powerbook). If you are going to buy a Windows PC for this you are much better off (in CPU horse power) but I think I would go for a Shuttle instead of a laptop. A shuttle gives you more power and is cheaper to repair. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen --- www.looproom.com (international) www.boysen.se (Swedish) --> iTunes Music Store / / / www.cdbaby.com/perboysen