The EDP and the Looperlative and me

[Mark Hamburg <mark@grubmah.com>]

I've had a few people ask recently why I might express a preference for 
the EDP over the Looperlative. My EDP's had been sitting in my spare rack 
unused for a bit but I wired them up yesterday and I thought I would try 
to run down the highlights for me in doing so,

Let me first say that the Looperlative by virtue of offering multiple 
high-quality stereo tracks and multiple routing options is a very nice 
piece of hardware and there are obviously lots of things it does that the 
EDP does not. Even with a pair of EDP's there are a number of things that 
don't work properly in stereo. That said, let me highlight some of the 
things I prefer about the EDP:

* Big friendly time readout. The Looperlative is harder to read at a 
distance and since it's constantly counting down or something, I can't 
really glance at it and get much useful information even if it were big 
enough to read at a distance.

* I like being able to dial in the tempo on the EDP and have it be a clock 
source for the rest of the system before the loop gets recorded.

* An optimized controller pedal. The Looperlative can work with lots of 
MIDI control surfaces and you can program them to do many things. If you 
have something as powerful as the Gordius, you even have a choice for how 
much you do there v on the Looperlative. But the EDP really exploits the 
hell out of the standard set of buttons and makes strong use of gestures 
like long-presses, etc which the Looperlative cannot as readily count on 
receiving from generic MIDI controllers.

* A modal approach to loop build up and modification. I'm overdubbing. Now 
I'm multiplying. Now I'm replacing. Etc. I express the mode that I want to 
be using to modify the loop and I can switch from mode to mode with a fair 
degree of intelligence in the EDP about what the mode switches mean. 
Contrast this with the Looperlative which just with Play, Overdub, and 
Replace+ seems to have trouble specifying where one will end up when 
switching back and forth since it wants to emphasize toggling in and out 
of modes. (That said, the fact that substitute is a sustained action 
undermines this...)

This last point is the big one for difference in feel, but I think it 
actually ties to some extent to the third one.

My suspicion is that if I ignored a bunch of functionality on the 
Looperlative and built up an appropriately programmed MIDI controller, I 
could probably get what I want, but I feel like I'm threading a needle 
whereas the EDP actually has a fair amount that's tuned and ready to go 
out of the box with nothing more than its standard controller pedal and 
possibly an expression pedal for feedback (though see the notes about 
stereo...).

Now, I need to decide where I'm going to invest my time...

Mark