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Looper's Delight
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On May 16, 2014, at 11:34 AM, Mike <mnelson@boomerangmusic.com> wrote:
> 2 tap record & play with stacking active
>
> While the Rang™ III can go directly from recording a loop to
> playing with stacking active, it is currently a 3 tap process involving
> one of the Bonus Buttons. It goes like this:
> Tap loop button – recording starts
> Tap Bonus button to select Stack – Stack light blinks
> Tap loop button – recording concludes, playback begins and Stacking is
> active
>
> Several customers have requested a more streamlined approach, so
> I’m going to outline a few methods and ask that y’all let me know which
> is the most appealing.
>
> 1) Press a loop button to begin recording… if the button is held down
> for 1 second then released, the second tap of that loop button will
> conclude recording and begin playback with Stack active. If a loop
> button is tapped and quickly released, the second tap will conclude
> recording and begin playback without Stacking; this is identical to the
> current behavior.
This could certainly work from the standpoint that holding the button at
the beginning of recording currently doesn’t mean anything. (At least I
don’t think it does.)
> 2) Rather than being the permanent behavior of the III, number 1 would
> be an Optional Behavior that the user can turn on and off.
Since the hold was meaningless before, I don’t see that the new behavior
would need to be optional.
> 3) Tap a loop button to begin recording; the second tap will conclude
> recording and begin playback with Stack active. With this design,
> holding the loop button down does nothing. This will definitely be an
> Optional Behavior that the user can turn on and off.
So, this is basically a switch to make it work in a
Rec->Stack->Play->Stop->Play mode? While I like the ability to go into
stacking, it seems like it makes the switch more complicated given that
after the first pass it doesn’t provide anyway to stack.
> 4) We could change the Stack behavior so that the following would occur.
> Tap a loop button to begin recording; tap Stack (Bonus button) to
> conclude recording and begin playback with Stack active. Tapping the
> loop button a second time would conclude recording and begin playback
> without Stacking. This will definitely be an Optional Behavior that the
> user can turn on and off.
> NOTE – for this to work well, one Bonus button would have to be assigned
> to Stack only. It couldn’t rigger two functions as the Bonus buttons
> normally do.
This would be good to do no matter what because I’m not clear that hitting
stack while in record is otherwise useful. I assume this would also work
with the dedicated stack button on the SideCar. (If it already works with
the dedicated button on the SideCar that may up the pressure for me to
create the pedal board space to accommodate a SideCar.)
I’m going to put forward one other option that would keep the current feel
of the Boomerang as largely a phrase looper — i.e., it’s more about
starting and stopping phrases than it is about mutating them though it
doesn’t stop one from mutating them. This feel stems from the fact that
the operation it makes particularly easy is starting and stopping loops
and that’s good for many uses. There are two reasons that I’m aware of to
go from Record into Stack. One of them is to set up an essentially
continuous stack — generally with decay — situation in which the loop is
being modified over and over again. Frippertronics would be an early
example. Depending on where decay is set, this can create a lot of
evolution or simply a wall of sound. The other reason is simply to smooth
the loop boundary when there are things like delay trails to deal with.
Here one wants a bit of overlap with no decay and the desired sequence
looks something like: Record->Stack->Play with the Stack to Play
transition coming fairly soon after the Record to Stack transition.
Stacking is transitory. To support this second use case, I would recommend
implementing:
Press: Record
Release: (nothing or option 1 from above)
Press: Stack (no decay)
Release: Play
This could be an optional behavior but I don’t know that it needs to be
since the only things it interferes with relative to the existing behavior
are: You will always get a little bit of stack overlap but this will be
very brief unless you tended to hold the button down at the end of
recording. Still making this all optional might avoid some squawking.
The reason I would argue this is better than just using option 1 to handle
the delay trails overlap issue is that option 1 requires: Hold to start
recording, worry about whether you’ve held long enough while playing,
release, tap to go to stack, and tap again to go to play. In contrast,
this require: Tap to start recording, press to end the loop, release when
you’ve captured enough trails.
It does, however, combine nicely with option 1 to thereby provide ways to
handle the two use cases for going straight into stack that I outlined
above.
Mark
P.S. Having recently posted an analysis of the Ditto X2 to the Facebook
group, I will note that addressing this issue — particularly doing
something like what I’ve outlined above — would go a long way toward
“perfecting” the Boomerang III in my opinion. The one other big issue for
me is that I want an option when working in any of the sync modes to have
loop lengths synced without having to sync the point at which recording
starts. For example, if I record a base cycle into loop 3 and then want to
record a possibly longer layer into one of the other loops, then I want to
be able to start recording immediately without having to wait for loop 3
to come back around. The loop logic just needs to know that I started
recording partway through the loop. Start and/or stop might still be
synced to loop 3’s cycle boundaries — I haven’t worked through that as
deeply — but if the natural point to begin the layer doesn’t come on the
downbeat, I should be able to do that.