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Looper's Delight
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On 24 jul 2006, at 07.10, rune fagereng wrote: > Regarding using Ableton as a mixer for your EDP. > Can you tell more about your gear and how you do this and maybe > also the strong and weak sides of doing it like this? I have a sound card with many inputs and outputs (RME Multiface). One strong side of Live's mixer is that it's very easy and fast to work with. I mean; all inputs and outputs are directly accessible on each track. Not only the analog and digital ins and outs of the sound card, you also get MIDI in and out and the option to set any other track as one track's output. This makes it easy to combine EDP and other hardware with software loopers of all kind. If you run Live on a Mac you may also incorporate the MIDI pipes built into the computer system which is handy for sending control MIDI data between plugins, tracks and external gear (in XP you can achieve about the same with the MIDI Yoke hack). Other strong sides is all the built-in effect plug-ins that comes with Live (I especially adore that Freeze Reverb) but I also find it cool to use Live's "Pan Plug" for beat synced tremolo with the option to sweep the tempo divider for those "copter landing/take-off" effects. A bit more advanced stuff you can do with Live is to create loops of MIDI (or "Clip Envelopes", see Live's manual) that you can launch to send sequences of commands to your loopers (to the EDP via the physical MIDI output port). If you record loops in Live, as Live Clips (either audio or MIDI loops) you may also do cool things with the random launching function (see Live's manual on "Follow Action"). Clips (loops) on the same track in Live can also be set to "legato mode" which means that if one loop is playing at 2 bars, on 4th and one 16th when you jump to another loop (for playback on that track) this new loop will take over and begin playing back also at "2 bars, on 4th and one 16th". Weak sides of using Live as the mixer for EDP (and other hardware audio devices) is that any live input (real-time audio stream) is being delayed by the process when the computer had to digitize it (the AD conversion - analog to digital). This is what's being called "latency" and is not a problem specific to Live but to all setups that combine external real-time processes with computer applications. I did not perceive it as a problem though when doing slow and ambient music, although I used the laptop with Live as the routing patch bay and mixer for both the EDP, analog filter bank (beat synced by MIDI Clock) and outboard reverb. I could mix these three audio sources and also send "effect aux send" to them without disturbing phasing errors or (worse) musical timing errors. Live has a built in latency compensation, but this can only work on tracks that play back already recorded material, because Live needs to "pre view" to do the time shifting. And there is no way to preview external real-time input. (Regarding AD/DA related latency I must say that I enjoy looping in Mobius as a standalone application because it's super tight and rock solid. Instead of MIDI loops in Live I'm now using special scripts that kind of do the same things - but you do hear the difference in musical accuracy... timing-wise). Another weak side with Live is that it's not very stable when used as the MIDI Clock sync slave. Especially with the EDP as the master, because every time you go HalfSpeed the tempo goes down by 50 percent. I really like to use that musically but with Live it's not possible (as it is when running a Repeater synced to the EDP). But this is not a problem as long as you use Live as the tempo master; you can assign a pedal to Tap Tempo in Live and this is the way I've been doing it (although I tend to feel about it as "a workaround"). Just tap four kicks on the tempo pedal and kick the fifth on the Looper Record button will work. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast) http://www.myspace.com/looproom