Re: EDP undo button

[Matthias Grob <matthias@grob.org>]

>beth asked:
>  > my new edp is just out of the box....when i press the undo button, it
>  > doesn't
>  > always undo the last loop....if it happens to work, when i hold the 
>undo
>  > button down for a long time, to undo the next-to-last loop, nothing
>  > happens
>  > at all...does anyone have any insights?  is there something wrong 
>with my
>  > edp or have i not figured out how to make it work?   signed, yet 
>another
>  > female looper(-to-be)....beth
>
>lance replied:
>don't know how far into the manual you've gotten, but somewhere i recall
>reading that the undo function is memory-dependent; in other words, you 
>can
>undo to the limits of the memory you have left. also, reverse is 
>unfortunately
>too complex a function for the edp to be able to undo (don't know if 
>you've
>tried the reverse function out yet, but it's tres cool. check out kim's
>reverse suggestions if you haven't already...)
>
>further. my sense is there's nothing wrong with your edp, tho :-)

This is all correct, thank you Lance!

But the main problem users have (including me, sometimes!):

The memory is used similar to a tape loop, so we keep copying the old 
to the new loop while adding new overdubs etc. By pressing UNDO once, 
you go back one loop in history.

If you overdub some sound, listen to it and decide to undo it, it 
already got copied to the new loop while you listened to it, so you 
need to press UNDO twice to erase the one that was recorded when you 
played and the one copied while you listened.
But pressing UNDO once also makes sense: if you feel you played wrong 
and want to get rid of it before it ever plays back.

Another effect: If you press less than necessary and the error apears 
again, you press UNDO again and then its still there. How could it be 
different? While you wait and listen whether its still there, you 
copy it into the new loop, so you can eternaly press UNDO once, 
listen to the error, press it again, listen again...

Does this make sense? I agree the the UNDO thing is not quite 
intuitive, but if you think about these cases, you may agree that its 
not easy to make it better...

Now we have another structure that makes it a bit more complicated: 
Since it does not make sense to fill up the whole memory with the 
same repeated loop while you dont change it, we detect whether there 
was a change, and if not, do what we call AutoUndo: we jump one loop 
back and thus keep repeating the same loop, thus saving previous 
versions in the memory. AutoUndo made it possible that you solo half 
an hour and then press UNDO twice and get rid of the last layer you 
played before the solo. Nice, huh?

But: AutoUndo happens at the loop start point. So when you press 
UNDO, ist interesting to see whether AutoUndo already happened. If 
not, UNDO will have almost no effect, because it mostly erases the 
just made copy. If you press UNDO after an AutoUndo happened, the 
first press will do.
To further simplyfy this operation (and confuse this documentation), 
we introduced another rounding: If you press UNDO close to the loop 
end, AutoUndo will happen anyway, so UNDO does what you want. So you 
dont have to worry whether you press UNDO shortly before or shortly 
after the loop start point.

And there is one more point to consider: You may have done an overdub 
that ended just after the loop start point. For you, musically, the 
end of the last note may not be interesting, but the EDP noted that 
there was a change and does not AutoUndo (not to chop off the tail of 
your last note). So it may seem to you that nothing changed when you 
press UNDO, while in reality, it errased such (maybe inaudible) tail.

So at that point we usually come back to the simple rule: press UNDO 
until the thing is gone. :-)

Matthias


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