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A question about looping

I

insinkerator

May 28, 2008
40
0
36
Cork, Ireland
www.richuncleskeleton.net
#1
I hope this is the right place.

My band are booting out our rhythm guitarist in the next couple of days, and we are hopefully going to be replacing him with looping and a macbook.

We already have a little experience looping live, with a couple of tracks having a third guitar looped, but with the guitarist gone, looping will need to be a lot more advanced.

Our first question is probably the biggest problem. With the main quality of looping being the fact that it loops over and over, being off time by a hair, when clicking in a loop or anything will have a cumulative effect, resulting in it sounding horrible.

Is it possible to like have all the loops hooked up to something that will equalise them in terms of time to avoid that from happening?
 
#3
Good question. I play guitar and sing with a drummer and often we don't have a lead guitarist. I'll use a RC-2 to lock in a rhythm loop so I can take a lead, but the drummer struggles to lock in with some of the loops. It would be nice if they would quantize in real time.

The ideal setup would be a looper that could take an external signal for the sole purpose of setting time. You could mike the drummer's snare and the looper would adjust in real time to the snare. Maybe it's out there...?
 
#4
You could probably hack up a looper that has a tap-tempo and using some clever electronic work make a mic that triggers the tap-tempo... But what if the mic picks up something that trips it off-beat?

Or instead of that imperfect solution, just tap the tempo yourself...

Or sync everything, including yourselves, to a master time clock unit...
 
#5
We probably could come up with a central tap tempo or something that we could keep at, the idea doesn't really appeal to me though.

I wonder would it be possible to have some sort of trigger set hooked up to the drum kit, and use that as the tap tempo. The only problem i could forsee with that is it would have to work off a beat that isnt going to be a basic 1-2-3-4
 
#6
You might want to consider getting a Boss RC-50. You can pre-record any loops that you want in advance - it has up to 49 minutes of loop-time (24 minutes in stereo) - and you can save your loops to your computer via USB. You can record three separate loops and either play them in parallel or in series (e.g., verse, chorus, bridge parts of a song). It has built-in drum rhythm tracks, including a lot of non-standard time signatures, and you can send the rhythm track through a sub-output to a headphone amp or separate on-stage monitor so that the crowd doesn't have to hear it. It has a tap-tempo function; the only problem is that changing the tempo on the loops tends to add wierd glitchy-ness. If you're using separate devices (e.g. a drum machine) you can MIDI-sync the RC-50 to the other device so that the tempos stay constant. There's a bit of a learning curve, but I've found that the functions are laid out in a fairly logical way and that it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.

They are about $500US new, but you can find used ones for much less than $400 (I got mine used for $250; $300-350 is more common).

-Y
 
#9
The Boss RC-20XL has a Loop Quantize function that basically takes out that bit of human error that can cause the loop to be a little off rhythm.

I've used the Quantize function a lot at live shows and it works very well, there isn't much of a learning curve either. The RC-50 would probably work better if you're looking to do a ton of live looping and it certainly has more features, but the RC-20XL would be a much cheaper alternative.
 

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