Re: Boomerang III quick review

[Mark Hamburg <mark@grubmah.com>]

On Jun 11, 2011, at 2:19 PM, Grant wrote:

>> I agree with you Mark. When I had the Boomerang that's the one thing 
>> that really bothered me. You can't go straight >into overdub after you 
>> finish the first loop. You can can tap the stack button before the loop 
>> end point (If you >created a short loop on loop3 to set the tempo) but 
>> it is too much tap dancing or at least my music suffered when I'm 
>> >quickly trying to press stack and play my instrument. Would be nice if 
>> you could set it up to go straight into stack >mode after establishing 
>> the loop. I also noticed that if I left it in stack mode and switched 
>> between loops1-3 I >would get clicks and pops. This was even if I 
>> wasn't playing anything on my instrument. I solved both of these issues 
>> >by using Mobius in software land but then I gained all the issues of 
>> using a computer:) Would be pretty awesome if >these things could be 
>> worked out on the boomerang. It would be a perfect compact looper for 
>> my serial style looping.
> 
> I believe you can press Stack anytime while a loop is recording (with or 
> without a master loop) and stacking will begin on that loop when you end 
> recording (Serial style). If you get a click it might be because you 
> have it set for seamless stacking (for drones) and this overides the 
> loop boundry smoothing. Just some things to check or try.

You can indeed press stack while recording. That's where the tap-dance 
part comes in.

        Loop N switch to start recording
        Stack (possibly a hold if you use the default configuration)
        Loop N switch to finish loop and start stacking
        Stack to stop stacking

Contrast this to Line 6, the Looperlative, etc:

        Rec/Dub --> Recording
        Rec/Dub --> Overdubbing
        Rec/Dub --> Playing

Or to the EDP:

        Record --> Recording
        Overdub --> Overdubbing (and note that overdub is the next switch 
over)
        Overdub --> Playing

I'm trying to convince Mike Nelson that you should be able to finish 
recording with a hold and have the loop length set based on the button 
down point but it would stack at decay 0 (feedback 100%) until you 
released the button. If you really want to do the Frippertronic ever 
evolving loop thing, you would still want to use the stack button 
behavior, but for a simple "keep the delay tails" loop closure this would 
work.

The mockups of the forthcoming sidecar has a dedicated stack button which 
one could argue should exit recording and go into stacking if one was 
recording. Then you could use it just like the EDP.

Returning to what the Boomerang does as opposed to what it doesn't do. 
I've played some more and I've done some more half-speed work and I'm now 
quite happy with the sound quality. So, except for it being too hard to go 
from record into overdub, this is proving to be a great box. (Did I 
mention how small it is and how solid it feels and how great the switches 
are?)

Mark