Hi all. I’m trying to discover how people want to use looping on the MOD unit so that I can focus my development efforts in the right direction. This is the first of presumably several polls to start to get an idea of what people want. Please take the time to click on as many options below apply to what you want. I will devise follow-up polls after I get responses from this poll. Feel free to reply with any comments that you have beyond what can be selected in the poll.
also, for me personally, arbitrary control of playback rate (not just half or double), independantly for various tracks, is a very desirable capability… although i realize that might be well outside the mandate of this particular plugin.
Nothing is strictly out of the question at this point. I’m looking to make this the best looper in any multieffects device. There are some limitations especially around user interface that are dictated by the device architecture, but other than that, anything is on the table for discussion.
what i used for many years, when i was performing with a computer on stage, was Jesse Chappell’s sooperlooper… the deep feature set of arbitrary and independant loops operation was very useful for me!
here it is, for anybody who’s unfamiliar: sooperlooper
…obviously, this level of flexibility is not reasonable for the MOD device, but finding a way to retain some of those sorts of independant loops features would be fantastic – even if there was a separate, toggled mode of operation which opened up some capabilities, dropping some of the quantized, synced characteristics of traditional simple loopers.
It is my intent to discuss these topics with MOD. The physical Looperlative products offer a complex array of features that do make the looper harder to use, but the features are rich. I’d like to find a way with the MOD to offer both complex features and a simple mode for the novice user.
I have been using loops extensively for ages, was a beta tester for the Electric Repeater, and I can say there are very few hardware devices or plug-ins which actually recreate what I am able to do with a multi-track tape loop. I use a modified Fostex R-8 btw.
For example, most hardware loopers will either switch from record to playback, or from record to overdub, after the first pass of the loop. Tape doesn’t do this, it re-records over the tape until you disengage record.
So for most loopers, once you hit record, you have to be perfect because you have decided to commit your performance to the loop, before you have performed it. With tape, you can engage record, improvise until you get something you like, and make the decision to disengage record “after” you have played your best take - this is a crucial difference that so many loopers get wrong.
With my LP1, you can program buttons so that you go from record directly to replace mode. There is no reason why a similar mode couldn’t be added to the plugin.
I used to try loopers when I was a more novice musician, and this reality definitely exacerbated my feelings of incompetence as a musician. Whether it was missing the timing by more than a few milliseconds (in a non-quantized setting) or struggling to play the 4 or 8 bars cleanly. I hadn’t considered until now the benefits of a replace mode as you describe.
I agree with some of the points raised here - arbitrary control of playback rate and replace mode(s). Latency compensation could also be useful for incorporating external gear, albeit mono until multichannel usb audio interfaces get supported - if/when ;). I’ve also used hardware tape and with replace modes you can achieve the continuous tape degradation effects of sound-on-sound recording as each pass becomes more saturated and lo-fi - as recreated on some Strymon gear. It would seem plausible on the MOD platform to incorporate tape saturation plugins and other effects into an effects loop within a looper plugin for SOS styles - if that makes sense.
Mainly to keep replace loops from drifting and in sync with overdubs. Sooperlooper has flexible latency compensation features mainly for keeping overdubs in place depending on your monitoring setup - soft/hard monitoring; SooperLooper - Documentation :: Sync/Tempo. I’ve used jack_delay to calculate precise (1/1000th of a sample) hardware induced latency when incorporating real tape (D/A → Record head → Play head → A/D) and use those calculated values so the SOS ‘degrading’ loops don’t drift and truncate with each pass and I can add the necessary delay to an overdub input to add new stuff into the loop in sync with what I’m listening to. Hard to explain in words
I use a Pigtronix Infinity, Boss RC-5 and TC Ditto+. Most of the time I am using them to capture riff ideas on the fly to transfer to a DAW and elaborate there. I have not yet done anything like building up a real-time performance on the fly because I make too many mistakes. Being able to sync the exported WAV into Ableton is very handy. MIDI sync (as on the Pigtronix) is very handy.
re MIDI sync; in case anyone here has a Digitech SDRUM - it actually chucks out midi data via the sync port so you can sync Jamman loopers from SDRUM and have other MIDI gear sync at the end of the chain. Just need the sort of jack-to-MIDI cable the MOD gear uses.
there is already a plugin that can record your output to a file. Would that meet your need? You could place it right after the looper. I’ve included it in a few boards, but haven’t really used it that much.
It’s funny actually, when you integrate analog tape as I outlined, if you use a regular tape reel/cassette rather than a tape loop then you end up with a long recording of the continuously oversaturating/degrading lo-fi loop - like half an hour or how ever long you get lost for
Looperlative already does MIDI sync out and in reliably. The LP3 plugin on the MOD supports this. I’ll add this to the list of instructional videos that need to be made.
You can save audio, but the LP3 plugin doesn’t currently have a mechanism for exporting the audio. Of course, the Looperlative LP1 device does offer a way to export and import audio. So, getting that feature into the plugin should be possible as well.
If it saves audio, I guess there must be a folder somewhere on the device with the files, so I guess you could get them via SSH. By the way, looks like the Zynthian guys are implementing a pretty full featured version of Sooperlooper so the race is on. Perhaps someone should get hold of Jesse Chappell so we can play you two off against each other and see what features we can squeeze out of you both …the ultimate Sooperlative plugin Nice hardware looper you make by the way, perhaps someday I’ll save enough to buy one. Obviously a preferred choice to a Rpi.
