2880 midi sync experience report (my first post)

["Nick (Ecce)" <eccemusic@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

Another member of this list kindly lent me an Electro Harmonix 2880 to evaluate (and I've taken far too long as I've been so busy!)

I thought it would be useful to share my experience.

I am using the 2880 as the slave, clock sync-ed to an Akai MPC1000 (sending only start, stop and clock), playing guitar and synth into the 2880.

After fiddling around with trying to get loops synced up for ages, this is the best way of doing things that I have come up with:

1. Set the 2880 to external midi sync, make sure quantize is off!
2. Press "new loop" on the 2880, then record (this does not start the recording process, but the midi sync LED will start flashing with the record LED, kind of saying "Ready when you are!" to the sequencer)
3. Press play on the MPC1000, the 2880 will start recording (I always make this first loop a blank loop)
4. Before your required loop length is up, press quantize.
5. Any time after the beginning of the final bar of your required loop length, and before your desired restart point of the loop press play. The quantize button will flash until that bar is up, then the 2880 will go into play mode, with a loop length identical to the number of bars you would like. Anything you recorded during that time would likely be useless as it would be stretched all over the place - hence why I keep it blank.

This is useful for the kind of applications I had in mind for a looper, as I wanted a set length loop to run over the length of a song performance. This way I am assured of, say, a four bar repeating loop during a song that I can continually overdub to, punch in to, re-record etc.

The caveat is that if you were to then press "reverse", you hear and analog-delay like speeding up and slowing down of the entire loop until it is reversed and running back in sync. If you don't want that effect it is necessary to turn the 2880 down on your mixer until you know you are safe!

In my opinion the 2880 is a wonderful midi-synced looper, but not if you want to start looping from the moment you press record. It's needs some time to settle down before you can start having fun. Once you are there though, there is much fun to be had - IMO recording with the faders slightly lower than maximum gives a great feedback effect over time.

The one thing I cannot do that I would like to is *not* stop the 2880 when I stop the MPC - would be nice to run the feedback while I load up samples for the next song! If anyone has any ideas lemme know.