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Looper's Delight
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>>Man... that seems [snip] recockulous.<<
indeed. still, it might be a good way to use up a lot of smaller cfc cards after upgrading a repeater or a digital camera... :-)
my 2880 is in the hands of a work colleague who's promised to "review" it for me, since I had a genoqs octopus arrive at more-or-less the same time. I played with it long enough to notice that the sound quality was reasonable, but that functionally it comes nowhere near the repeater. in fact, it's probably closest to the looper part of the original jam-man, with some of the bob sellon recoding applied, perhaps.
the four loops (or two stereo loops) are all the same length, obviously, but run at the same time instead of one after another.
the thing therefore needs to be on a stand in front of the user so he can use the track sliders to bring loops in & out. the footswitch controller is thus also mandatory. I didn't use it long enough to suss the exact sequence of tapping required to make a loop exactly the length you want & go into overdub mode. if it can't do this, it's screwed as a looper, right?
observational side-bar:
most of the performing loopers I've seen who have to wait a bar before being able to overdub (i.e. their looper goes straight into play instead of overdub) have developed a bit of schtick whereby they make it clear to the audience that they are a) responsible for the noise you are hearing but that it's coming from a small box & b) as soon as they've "checked it back", they'll join in with it again. kt tunstall used to do this, & son of dave. I never saw anyone more at-ease with an unclocked jamman & a live drummer than christian "bic" hayes when he was in a band called levitation.
back to the 2880:
I can imagine a scenario wherein my guitarist would "prepare" a number of loops for a given piece, & mix them down to the separate stereo track in the thing, thus freeing up the four monos/two stereos for his (now not-so-)spontaneous live contributions to the same piece.
he may even be able, on a darkened stage, to fumble the cfc cards in & out of the thing for different numbers. if we put luminous markings on them.
but even on his best, least technophobic days, this workflow is going to be a bit of a chore, & is rather restrictive. & I still don't know if using an external midi clock locks you out of pitch-mangling on the thing. so we'd probably have to "tune-up" to his loops. not good, EH, not good.
meanwhile, across the stage, I am loading loops from one cfc card into the ram of my repeater, copying them to another part of the same card, track-slipping them, pitch-shifting them, fine-tuning them, trimming them, reversing them, overdubbing them, undo-ing & redo-ing.......
'nuff said?
I remember the first time I clapped eyes on a repeater. I remember being horrified at the garish, DJ-friendly look of the thing compared to our jammans, which were obviously for serious grown-up musicians & not aimed at people who dick around with turntables & get paid more than the people whose records they play. you'll be glad to hear I don't carry that attitude around with me much anymore, & in fact the first person I lent my repeater manual to was a DJ. trying to drum up some sales for them, y'see.
damn I wish I'd bought six instead of two.
duncan, equipment accumulator.
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