Following Acoustic Musicians with Looper

["Buzap Buzap" <buzap@gmx.net>]

Hi folks

When I loop _by_myself_, I'm quite happy with the musical freedom. If I 
have an idea in my head, I can transform it into sounding music on a 
looper more or less to my satisfaction.

When I play with others and _I_set_the_rhyhthm_ (and often also the bass 
line) on my looper, it also works out quite well.

When it comes to playing together with other acoustic musicians in a live 
setting where _they_set_the_tempo_ , there still seems to be a long way to 
go. 
Recently, I jammed with a couple acoustic musicians where I didn't 
dominate the song structure. So, the tempo was varying about ca. +/- 20 
BPM. Eventually, I had to turn my RC-2 off.

To make a long story short: What looping features & skills do you need to 
be able to play live with other musicians?
How do you keep in sync and keep up with tempo properly (acoustic 
instruments only and no drummer with a midi trigger)?

My first guess is that you need a looper with the following features:
- Retrigger loop(s)
- Tap tempo

So, what hardware loopers are able to do this?
Retrigger:
I can't really do that with my RC-50 + RC-2. You can't really stop and 
restart the loop because the ther will be a big "hole" in the music (maybe 
it works if you add a lot of reverb or put another loop under it?).

Tap Tempo:
More or less useless on RC-50 (might work if you only have percussion).
RC-2: works quite fine. But you cannot use an external foot pedal for that 
(tap tempo will work only in stop mode). That means you have to bend down.

So, how about other hardware loopers? And software (Mobius or 
SooperLooper)?

Have you experience with handling such situations in practice?

Best regards
Buzap


-- 
Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger gehört?
Der kanns mit allen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger