Re: looping & triggering (Sooperlooper & Musolomo)

[Per Boysen <per@boysen.se>]

On Aug 14, 2005, at 1:12, obadia wrote:

> Hello,
> I'm testing a set-up with both Sooperlooper and
> Musolomo. It seems to work so far.
> I use SooperLooper for looping and layering and
> Musolomo to sample the fresh loops on the fly and bind
> them straight away to a midikeyboard. It would give me
> the possibility to break previous material, and get
> many loops, fragments of loops or just isolated notes
> to trigger. I can imagine a performance evolving from
> building a layer syntax to deconstructing/rebuilding
> by triggering, tweaking and combinating.
> I use Live and Jack OSX to connect everything.
> Just curious if anyone has tried something similar?


Yes. SooperLooper is very good, but it did not work for me because of  
the lacking latency compensation. I want to play instruments with an  
exact musical timing, as the source material for looping. A couple of  
milliseconds getting lost here and there just ruins the feel. For  
more ambient musical styles SooperLooper is great though and also if  
you are not using analog live audio input, i.e. working with software  
instruments and plug-ins only.

Musolomo was very fun too, but I found it hard to use with my hands  
occupied by playing instruments. I tried to use an FCB1010 foot  
controller as well as triggering MIDI clips in Live to send the  
controller data to Musolomo. Got it partly working the way I wanted  
but gave up because it quickly became too un-intuitive for  
improvising. It seems to be more designed with the recording/remixing  
musician in mind. It felt more like a tool than like an instrument to  
me.

I tend to like the Augustus Loop better because it lets you "play"  
the pitch of the loop by midi notes (even when overdubbing live audio  
input), thus implying chord changes - a part of the musical language  
that many loopers sacrifice. Not much cutting and slicing  
possibilities (yet...) (the way you can chop up stuff into 128th  
notes on an EDP is unbeatable!)

A very nice looper in Ableton Live is the built in Ping-Pong delay.  
In Live 5 the Ping-Pong delay has recieved a little "F" symbol for  
"Freeze". Some interesting audio degeneration happens if you freeze a  
loop and then change the loop length. The ping-pong delay also has a  
built in equalizer, which means that you can set up MIDI clips that  
perform all kinds of rhythmic EQ stuttering to the loops. Such EQ  
patterns can be of a different length that the audio loop and you can  
apply all kind of random scripting to have playback automatically  
jump between different EQ pattern sequences (ie MIDI clips routed to  
the ping-pong delay's EQ as the target). You can also route the audio  
from the ping-pong delay to an audio track and record it as an audio  
clip for serious surgery. But that's beyond my horizon since it  
demands the hands-on-mouse-watching-the-screen concept.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.looproom.com (international)
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
--->  iTunes Music Store (digital)
www.cdbaby.com/perboysen