After several days and successully optimising a project for livelooping with electric violin and microphone input I have some plugin favourites which make dwarf standout, compared to ipad or laptop or hardwarelooper solutions.
I will still have loopy pro on ipad as main looper program, but I like it very very much, to be able to have everything in a tiny box without extensive cabeling.
Looping on a professional level would not be possible without “LP3”. LP3 is from the first 5 minutes better than any simple looping pedal. After a few hours working with it, I found, that it is capaple easily doing what my Boss 505 did (which I luckily sold for a good price after loopy pro was announced). With 3 synced LP3s I have enough synced but lengthindependend loops/tracks for doing advanced looping jams.
“drop” I love using octavers. Thisone is extremely fast with great audio quality and it is polyphonic. It is a real highend octaver which I totally love.
In combination with “sub synth” I get full synth-bass sounds out of my e-violin
I guess I will like whammy too, but so far I’m very happy with drop.
“harmonizer2” makes good sounding harmonies without much latency. Great little harmonizer.
“Autotune” I love practising intonation with it. Sometimes I want absolut straight intonation, then I use that very fast and accurate autotuner. Great device!
My favourite EQ is the big 5 band parametric version, but I found pedals from GuitarX vvery interesting too.
I didn’t find a special saturator that I loved, but there are several devices for subtle violin saturation.
I tried several reverbs and used the most cpu efficient. Forgot the name… soundwise there are some really good ones for dwarf, but also DSP hungry.
“Gaffa” is a beautiful Delay plugin, but leads to DSP spike problems in combintion with convolution loader and LP3. It would be m favourite delay.
convolution loader from x42 is dsp efficient and to be honest, a year ago I would have paid 200€ alone for a hardware device firing my IRs for violin. Now I got a used dwarf for 315€ which does the whole thing
I still have room for experiments in my project and will look for some lofi synth and drum sounds, maybe using samples.
Damn. Did not know that’s possible. may I have details on stacking lp3’s and your looping approach? My previous looping experience was boss rc300, and sort of failed to achieve similar workflow with lp3. But I never thought about stacking them.
@ignis sorry, but my latest tests failed. The LP3s didn’t sync although being midi connected and set to Midi sync :-(. … Hope I did something wrong or Looperlative solves it. and dsp/cpu spikes returned… It really seems as if handling cache with some plugins in parallell leads to problems
@malfunction54 It’s just intuition. My thought is: “What do convolution reverbs, Echo and Looper have in common? What could make them conflict in a way, that they produce dropouts… They deal with putting larger amounts of data to memory… so maybe this is the conflict?”
My observation, that adding 3 LP3s in combination with other plugins (conolution and Gaffa delay) lead to dropouts makes me even more thinking in that direction. LP3 is extremely CPU friendly, so the RAM is the more critical part, I guess…
I once used the soniccore scopeplatform and PCI was always the bottleneck for reverbs because of data transfer rates being high with reverbs.
Oh, I see. What is the memory usage meter reporting? Something else that might be helpful is connecting to the MOD directly via SSH, assuming that’s something you’re comfortable doing. you can use ‘top’ and get a different view of actual CPU usage that way.
I guess you are on the right trap here. But, what else those plugs have in common? They use background threads. The Dwarf have a quad Core CPU, means it could handle 4 threads simultaneous without ever any issue arrive. It could easily handle more threads (and usually does) as long, every thread leaves enough CPU time for other threads to run. If that is not the case, while a expensive operation needs to be done, for example loading a bunch of data from disk, caching issues arise, means, other threads needs to transport the hole cached data from one CPU core cache to a other one, which may have time to handle the request, in order to try to operate the task in time. This is known as context switch and is very very costly on CPU time and often enough leads to Xruns (crackle). While any plug for itself runs easily fine without any issue, a multiplication of this issues leads to what you experience. Therefore there is a worker thread extension, to avoid that issue, but not all plugs use it.
@ignis32 Internally actually it seems not to be possible Even Midi-Loopback did not work. BUT:
I just connected midi in and out with a physical cable. With the nice Button settings (multiple functions per button) I now have an Über-Looper with 6 independend but syncronized Tracks under my foot… WITHOUT ANY ADDITIONAL MIDI FOOTSWITCH!!! Just Dwarf Buttons & Knobs (used as Buttons).
Wow, didn’t know that so far: you can simply double midi out from dwarf using a Y headphone adapter…
Second finding today: Just connect a midi device to the mod host usb and you can send Midi to the device immediate. My drumcomputer synced to LP3 at once.
It would be m favourite delay.
