best looper for sync with a drum machine revisited...

[mark sottilaro <zerocrossing2001@yahoo.com>]

A while ago Rick W asked what the best looper for drum
machine use was.  At that time the Looperlative was
only speculation.  Now I have one!

The good news is, it works.  Once you sync a
loop/track to the clock it more or less stays.  What
do I mean by "less?"  Once you initiate a play/stop
function your sync is gone.  This is a bit problematic
if you're trying to do looping involving multiple
loops the way the the EDP, Repeater, Jamman and
Loopstation work. (does the Loopstation work this way?
 I realized I think it does but I honestly don't
know...)

If you want multipal TRACKS it works great.  They
don't even have to be the same length, which is also
great.  You can control the volume of each track. 
Sweet.  However, trying to build a loop, then cue a
new loop to start recording at the end of your current
loop... works until you try to go back to your first
loop.  I've tried to find a work around but the
closest thing I could figure out is to use the volume
control to mute tracks.  There then becomes overlap
between loops.  Is it cool?  Yes, but I miss having
that ability to build a loop, start a new one, start
to play over it and then bring back the old loop.

So if you're looking for more structured looping (in a
"song" sense), perhaps keep your EDP or Repeater.  I
love the way the Repeater gives you 99 4 track loops,
I only wish a cued record/play could happen with a
single midi command.  Maybe on the mk2?  HA!

The looperlative also doesn't seem to respond to
traditional "stop" and "play" messages like the
Repeater does.  Does the EDP?  I don't know.  Stop my
drums and the Looperlative loops on.  I haven't tried
it's MIDI learn to see if it can respond to these
commands though, it may.

If you're not synced to a clock like I am, disregard
the above.  The Looperlative is great at doing the a/b
loop sort of thing... it just falls down when the midi
clock thing comes into play.  Bob has expressed the
possibility of adding this functionality in the
future, and in fairness the Looperlative is a young
product.  In it's short life I've already seen a bunch
of cool functionality added, such as replace which got
added in v 1.0.5.

Mark Sottilaro

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