Looping Survey - status report

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

Thanks to all of you who already took the survey at
http://tinyurl.com/23csuj (so far, there were 42 responses) and also
provided valuable feedback (re: Looperlative). Now some 36 hours after it
had been put online, I'm gonna give you a quick status report...have fun!

The explanations to the data come directly from looking at the survey, if
you haven't done so already, I suggest you just take the survey - it won't
take you more than five minutes or so. Thank you!

Age and looping experience:
The largest age group (>52%) is 35-50, with the >50 coming in second with
31%. No one under 20 years so far.
More than 2/3 of the population have more than 5 years of looping 
experience
under their belt.

Ensemble settings, improvisation, "intensity" of looping and usage of
looping:
All of the participants use looping in a solo setting, with close to 60%
also using it in ensemble settings. Over 95% use looping in all of or a
substantial part of their work. More than 3/4 use free improvisation in
their looping work.
The most important applications of looping are layering of parts on the 
same
and on different instruments (93% and 69% respectively) and bringing
structure to improvised material (also 69%).

This somehow relates to the question Warren asked some time ago regarding
free improvisation and using looping to structure it: Obviously, around 70%
use looping in freely improvised material and see looping as a possibility
to structure it.

Explain looper:
1/3 would explain a looper as "some kind of delay", followed by 31% who
would explain it as "some kind of sampler".

HW vs. SW:
More than 71% prefer hardware loopers.

HW loopers:
The top3 usage-wise are the EDP (close to 55%), followed by a draw between
Repeater and Lexicon Vortex (both 43%).
The best-liked HW looper (and here I only considered devices with more than
6 votes) is also the EDP (with an average of over 90%), followed by the
repeater (77%) and the Headrush series (71%).
It's interesting to see here that while the majority of EDP users (74%) 
rate
it "++", the rating seen most often (67%) for the Repeater is "+".

SW loopers:
Most-used are Ableton Live (38%), Mobius (36%) and MAX/MSP (19%).
Rating-wise, the top of the heap is very crowded: Mobius (89%) beats
AugustusLoop (85%) and MAX/MSP (82%).

SUMMARY:
Not so many big surprises here. The looping community (at least those who
took the survey) are a very experienced (if somewhat aged) group, which 
also
might explain the relatively low likes for software loopers. All of us use
looping "to play with ourselves", and a big majority are free improvisers.
Equipment-wise, the EDP still rules both with regard to number of users and
users ratings. In the software domain, the ratings for Mobius and
AugustusLoop also don't offer an answer to the "Windows or Mac" question.

        Rainer