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Looper's Delight
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On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote: > I have a musical student who wants me to teach him about > his RC-50. > Unfortunately, I don't have too much experience with this unit. > > RC-50 users, would you kindly answer a couple of questions I have about >this > unit? > > > 1) Are all the synchronized three loops always the same length? > 2) If not, can someone direct me to how to use this unit to create > different lengthed (albeit > synchronized loops)? > 3) Does the RC-50 do double or half speed manipulations of the loop > 4) Does the RC-50 have any kind of feedback control of loops? > 5) is there any way to have two loops synced and a third loop random in > legnth > 6) Does this unit have any UNDO features. Below I'll translate some chosen parts from an RC-50 review I wrote in Swedish a couple of years ago. For quick check on details you can always have look at http://www.looproom.com/looperchart.php Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se www.perboysen.com First thing to do with the Loop Station is to make up your mind about in what mode you want to use it. In Multi Mode you can work with three possible loops in parallel. You can treat these three loops as different channels, i.e. sending them to separate outputs in order to use different effects on them. Or you may want to sum them into the main stereo output of the RC-50. In Single Mode only one loop channel can play back at a time. No parallel loops here, but you may jump between the three loops to go "verse-chorus-breakdown", as a simple musical arrangement. Of the seven big kick buttons three are exclusively attached to the three loops. In advance you can set it to either immediately jump to the start of the new loop or to make the switch at the end of the playing loop. Having only three possible loops doesn't restrict the number of layers you can overdub. Any loop may take as many overdubs as you wish. Button one has a multiple functionality; first time you kick it it goes Record, second time you kick it the looper goes Play (recording stops, loop point is set and the caught audio starts looping back). Third time you kick button one it goes Overdub to let you add more layers to the loop. If you miss a cue or play a bad note you may want to hit the button for Undo. This peels off the last overdubbed layer form the loop - no more. You can never go further back in time than the last layer. If you kick the Undo button a second time it is interpreted as Redo and your bad note merrily enters playback again. This restricted Undo/Redo functionality can be used creatively for background variation while you play over the looper with an instrument. The classic looper function Multiply can be achieved by using many channels. Instead of multiplying a shorter loop into a chain of clones while overdubbing you should turn of the RC-50's Loop Sync and put it into Multi Mode and record on two channels. The machine then offers a good quantizing so loops of different length play together without drifting apart. Here's an option to explore poly rhythm and contrapunct. The elementary looping function Feedback is sadly lacking in the RC-50. The USB port may come in handy for those that have a computer based home studio. Pop in a USB cable and use the computer mouse to lift over loops as wav files in both directions. The RC-50 can not take over as the computer's soundcard though. The RC-50 offers MIDI Clock Sync in and out. But it can't calculate the tempo from a caught loop - you have to set a tempo first and then follow that tempo when playing to record the first loop. Tempo can be set by tapping the beat on a Tap Tempo pedal and this works very well. You can change the tempo while the music is playing but be warned that it sounds terrible! The time stretching algorithm doesn't seem very efficient. Start out at the correct tempo and stay at it to get the best sound out of this machine. (originally written in Swedish for FUZZ Guitar Player magazine)