Went to Heavy Cloud‘s den last night with my studio mate to get learned some on this looping business.
HC’s default set up is to plug two mac laptops into individual digital to analog converters that are connected to a small mixer into a power amp. The laptops are further linked by midi which makes one laptop the master. The other laptop isn’t all slave though, the only thing the midi is setting is the tempo. Each laptop is running it’s own software with it’s own saved tone manipulations and musical patterns. They use Ableton LIVE which has some nice features for recording loops either midi loops or audio-in. We recorded a live trumpet track while we were there. I noticed when I hit “record,” LIVE waited for the beginning of the measure before recording and when I hit “stop” it waited until the end of the measure to stop.
It’s funny how a meet up like this can shake things up. My studio mate asked HC about cueing up –getting something going but controlling when the new sound is in the main mix. HC is just now starting to focus on doing what they do in a live environment but they hadn’t worked with the cue controls yet. We found pretty quickly that LIVE does have this capability and it looked pretty easy to engage.
Our plan is a little different than HC. HC is currently almost pure laptop but they do have ambition to lay analog audio, like drums, on top of their laptop creations in a live environment. We however are looking at a more analog sound; looping mainly analog instruments in a live environment. We do have some cool tone generators though that don’t have their own built in method of recording loops. Something like LIVE could work very well for these instruments. I’m not sure though if we will try to sync everything to a tempo via midi.
It might hinge on how work the pedals like the Digitech Jam Man I got off ebay yesterday. I’m terribly excited to mess with it. Was surprised to see it had so many inputs (aux 1/8″, 1/4″, xlr and usb). Also a foot switch (wtf is a foot pedal doing with a foot pedal?). It’s also got a lot more buttons than I’m used to on a stomp box. Unfortunately it did not come with a manual. It also didn’t come with the foot pedal as shown in the link above.
I’m getting more and more curious about how we are going to tackle the live drum looping. I’m wondering if a midi foot controller might be just the ticket –so that the drummer can trigger when the loop starts and ends hisself.
One of my studio mates is in Shanghai for a couple of weeks. Works near a Chinese musical instrument shop and he offered to pick up an instrument. I immediately thought of the zheng –I’ve seen it put to good use at the Chicago World Music Festival. Here’s a video (and am I an old pervert for finding this erotic?).
This might be too much to carry though so I gave him alternates. This lute like instrument (pi pa) and this whistle (hulusi).
Got any recommendations?
