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Looper's Delight
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Philip. --On 12 February 2012 23:35 +0100 Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com> wrote:
I just looked a little deeper into the Max for Live device Kapture. This device offers instant recall. It lets you record and store snapshots of the whole mixer plus devices settings. And this includes looping plugins too! Can you see the tremendous performance power in this for live looping musicians? You can totally design your own looping interface like you want it. Simply decide on what control commands you want, set up mixer and plugins for that and snag a snapshot of it. For some snapshots you may deselect a lot of mixer parameters and only have the snapshot recall the looper's settings, or maybe just one of many loopers you are using. Snapshots can be activated in two ways. First, you mouse the drop-down menu of the Kapture plugin's GUI. Second, you launch an empty clip in Live that has the same name as the Kapture snapshot it's meant to activate. This gives that you can handle a very complex performance setup with only three MIDI pedals: Scene Up, Scene Down and Scene Launch. Compare that to the classic way of assigning one pedal switch for each function. Over here I will keep my 80 pedals (8 Gordius banks of 10 each) and just assign three of them for Kapture. Then I'll see whee this takes me. I just checked with Augustus Loop and every damn parameter in the looper is captured by Kapture. Finally this is opening up a way to use this wonderful looper plugin IRL. My issue with Augustus have always been that I can't press all buttons for all things I want to make happen at once. The EDP functionality design is easier to use but lacks some cool stuff you can do with Augustus. With Augustus it typically makes sense to keep a direct MIDI binding to the Freeze Button, besides this Kapture Snapshot system. Finally, you may rework your setup very quickly in a modular way. Just move around the live clips for different Kapture snapshots. You may put several rows of them in Live's Session View (the data spreadsheat-like interface) so that one Scene (all clips at the same horizontal level) will only launch these Snapshot Clips. Very useful, especially if you work on many projects and has an issue remembering the different setups. Here you can simply read it on the screen, or easily memorize it visually before a concert. FYI I can tell that this total recall approach for many years has been the base for the French software looper Logeloop as well as for Numerology. In those two apps "saving a preset" takes a snapshot of everything, just like this Kapture thing. One thing I will start fiddling around with now, using Augustus Loop and Kapture, is to work with long bows of slow speed shifts, as this looper offers non-quantized continuous speed/pitch shift. I did some of that on the album with Erdem but until this Kapture I've seen a live concert tool that would allow experimenting with it on stage (except for Logeloop, but I can't run many of my tone shaping plugins in that Max built looper so Live currently works better for me). Ok, signing off now. Just wanted to mention this if someone out there also has been looking for these kind of tools. Oh, I should mention that instant recall of everything is not all snappy. At least not according to a discussion on the Max For Live forum. Some users there report that not all settings change at the same time. But I'm not sure that should seen as a showstopper, after all Plastikman uses Kapture every night to coordinate both Ableton Live mix mashup improvisation and synced video. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.perboysen.com http://www.youtube.com/perboysen