Re: Looperlative LP2

[Zak Kramer <crazyquilt@gmail.com>]

Thanks for understanding, all. I've been on TGP for almost seven years, so I'm all too aware of its many limitations. That, in fact, was one of the big reasons I wanted to do things the way that I did, in an attempt to be useful without being defamatory. OTOH, although I've lurked on LD for years, I haven't posted often, and while I appreciate the more close knit LD community, that's also why I didn't post the clip here when I made it. 

That being said, for anyone who hasn't heard the clip, here it is for context: http://soundcloud.com/bigblueguitar/lp2-clip There is also an explanation of what's going on in the clip.


In terms of my signal chain: Gretsch 6120 with TV Classics (so fairly low output) to Line 6 M13 to LP2 to Swart Atomic Space Tone. I had the Swart set down to about 3 on the volume IIRC; it has good headroom there for my Gretsch, esp. given that I play with bare fingers or thumbpick & fingers. I don't like the low input for the Gretsch, so this was the regular input. All cable was Mogami Gold, which is hopelessly plebeian by TGP standards, but there we are. Mic was a Senn e906 -> Apogee Duet -> Mac mini running Sound Studio. The M13 was only used to record a simple loop so as to remove variables arising from different playing dynamics, etc. In performance, I usually go guitar -> looper -> amp. I haven't used pedals or other signal processors, except loopers, in performance in years.

Andy mentioned how the last part of the clip is the loudest, and so it caused the amp to distort. That's mostly accurate, but not all of the story. I very carefully set the LP2 so that its dry signal was as close to unity gain as possible. You can hear that in the first 2 cycles of the M13 loop. If I wanted to get the dry signal to match the volume of the loops, needed to use the LP2's mix knob to boost the dry signal such that I lost a good bit of amp headroom, and gained a lot of noise. 

andy said: "I don't know how the gain setting thing works on the LP2, it *should*
still give a 1:1 gain ratio input to output when the gain setting is changed,
....but it seems from the demo that it doesn't, as there's apparent gain staging problems
where there really shouldn't be."

That was exactly my assumption about how it should work, as well as my conclusion about how, in fact, it was working. It was very shocking to play a phrase, record it, then have the loop come out significantly louder. There is iirc, no loop volume, only a wet/dry mix knob which I used, as per the manual, to set the gain of my dry signal.

HTH,

Zak Kramer