Live and Loopy

Describe your looping workflow

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sloopdog
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2013 11:21 am

Live and Loopy

Post by sloopdog »

Hi, long-time user, first time caller, here :)

I've skimmed over some of the other posts (frankly, I'm a lazy reader and my glasses need changing) and thought it might be some use to others if I went through my live set-up. It cost me a pittance but works out as a reasonably versatile and, dare i say, powerful piece of kit.

First (you can skip this paragraph, it's boring, but come back to it later if you're stuck for something better to read), I thought I'd try my hand at busking for a while. I was in need of a little extra money and had only a few weeks earlier been asked to play live for a festival stall, so I'd been given some confidence that people wouldn't throw rotten fruit at me. I consider myself a composer and don't really have too much in the way of a "live" repertoire, preferring to jam for inspiration. Nevertheless, I learned a couple of songs, gathered together a couple of backing tracks that I could play guitar along with and built myself a portable wheely-studio featuring a Roland Micro amp, a tiny MP3 player, a Boss DDL and, for the USP, MIDIfied my guitar and added a half-rack synth module and RolanD GI20. This was all powered with a 12 volt lead-acid battery from Maplins, which gives me between six and eight hours of battery life per charge, and it all went into a box I'd built. the whole lot went onto a trolley for portability. After a couple of times on the street, I was offered a regular gig (indoors) and after a few weeks thought about how I might give even more value for money to my new employer. I hunted around for looping pedals and was seriously tempted by a Vox pedal until I saw the price, which I estimated was even more than the cost of my lap top. Which was when I began to seriously consider my lap top. It was already running Linux on the Joli-Cloud (it now has Mageia installed on it) and about thirty seconds of Duck-Duck Going later I'd landed on the Sooper Looper website, downloaded the prog and installed it.

And this is where the fun began. Skip-readers can pick it up from here...

I knew I needed pedals - this was an entirely one-man-operation - and I had a USB MIDI toy key-board knocking about (the makers probably wouldn't appreciate that description) which had a two-foot rubber keyboard attached to a 4x2" box containing the relevant electronics. I whacked off the rubber keyboard, soldered wires directly to the contacts in the box which related to particular note keys, demolished a plastic guitar that I bought from a street vendor for a fiver and took the switches out of it, fixed these onto simple hinges made from corrugated plastic picture-mounting board, stuck these three "pedals" onto the interface box and six more to slender blocks of wood, wired the whole lot up and, using the MIDI-Assign of Sooper Looper, made them 1) Record Loop One 2) Overdub Loop One 3) Restart All 4) Record, Overdub and Undo Loop Two 5) Record, Overdub and Undo Loop Three. I have four loops available to me on SL but figured that while a loop was playing, if I needed the extra, I could do it manually.

Then I got adventurous.

Thinking that I might try a song or two in the future, I made a second MIDI Assign file especially for songs which allows me to record, overdub and undo Loop One; Mute Loop One while recording Loop two (for the chorus); Mute Loop Two and Play Loop One for repeats of the verse; and Mute Loop One Start Loop Two for the repeat of the chorus with; Record Loop 3, Mute One and Two for long fade-outs - and Hey Jude.

Both set-ups work impeccably in live situations, which is more than I can honestly vouch for the operator, with the only limitation being the battery life of the lap-top when I'm not running off the mains supply.

On the Linux side, Jack makes all my connections for me and my brother built a programme, with Jack-Capture as the basis, which lets me record each loop separately and my guitar line on another track for tinkering about with later when I get back to my home studio. That usually means correcting the duff notes. Additional flourishes include the addition of an analogue battery-powered four-channel mic mixer (sometimes other people like to sing or play bongos or something) and the optional addition of other effects pedals and instruments. I use, for example, a small MIDI keyboard with the fabulous Fluid Synth when I'm feeling keyboardy.

And that's my story. Little wonder, then, that J.K.Rowling will forever outsell me....

S
kasbah
Posts: 117
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:01 pm

Re: Live and Loopy

Post by kasbah »

Ha! That's quite the write-up, thanks for sharing.
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