great question, I haven’t done much other than looping. I’ll play around later tonight and take a look. I’d be shocked if you had to stop to manipulate clips.
Yeah, I’ve read about all the trouble with the Ditto. It sucks since it is small and cheap. Wish they’d get it right.
All those Boss ones just don’t do it for me. Something about most Boss/Roland gear just puts me off too. Biased I know, but probably wouldn’t like them even if I tried them out.
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Eh, both are a bit limited. Particularly with recording time.
What about Zoia ?
(In fact i might open a topic on live looping with Zoia…)
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Yes please do.
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2x Electro Harmonix 2880 with Original foot-controller. Great Pre Amps and basically a Digital Tape machine
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With the Pigtronix Infinity Looper you may re-pitch chromatically according to MIDI notes, which can sound very strange in a good way. This can be done in real-time while you’re over-dubbing within a given loop buffer. It sounds good quality-wise.
You could also use an expression pedal to re-pitch by foot in real-time while over-dubbing. The movement of the expression pedal is slewed (smoothed). To my knowledge, the amount of slewing is not something you can control. With that said, it does not offend me… it sounds nice. It is the same slew that is applied when the BPM is changed.
Of course the expression pedal may also be used to change the loop decay when overdubbing, or the overall recorded loop volume.
Another neat thing was that you could re-pitch incrementally using the remote pedal shortcuts (without using an expression pedal). This can be changed incrementally according to the set interval. There was some depth to this which I did not explore yet, but the details for this should all be in the manual.
Here is an excerpt from the manual listing the available intervals: “Minor Second, Major Second, Minor Third, Major Third, Perfect Fourth, Diminished Fifth, Perfect Fifth, Minor Sixth, Major Sixth, Minor Seventh, Major Seventh, Perfect Octave.”
An interesting thing of note about re-pitching is that when the pedal is in a higher quality recording mode (24 bits/48 kHz) - you can only pitch down from there since re-pitching is accomplished by changing the sample rate. So if you want the highest possible audio quality, you will only be down-pitching recorded loops.
From the manual: “By default, loop audio that is recorded at 48 kHz can only get longer and lower in pitch. To enable sped- up, shorter, and pitched-up loops, this initial recording rate must be lowered before recording audio.” I think this equates to having to use 24 kHz if you want to have the ability to re-pitch a recorded loop both up and down. in my experience, 24 kHz sounded fine and very useable. keep in mind I was using it for guitar.
Please look up Varispeed in the manual for more details. Also, look up auto zero record. Have fun!
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I like the idea of sliders on the ehx 45000. My friend had his new Roland 101 over and that part was fun.
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No, it has no fx onboard. It only loops and has several tracks.
I only use it for looping instruments for live shows… If I need fx I use external fx, if I need mangling I use OT…
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I think it might be less practical than your reference units, but the Chase Bliss Blooper is coming soon.
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I also used my Octatrack as a looper, with KMI Softstep 2 as the foot controller. It takes some practice, as it’s easy to mess up the sequence of commands, and make mistakes like stopping a loop when I meant to overdub some more. Lately I’ve leaned more in the direction of using the OT to mangle prepared audio rather than live looping.
Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the power supply for the KMI Expander, necessary for connecting the Softstep 2 to Octatrack or other MIDI DIN device when there’s no computer. Haven’t decided if I should buy a replacement or wait until I get a more powerful unit like the Boss ES-8, which can send MIDI Program Change, etc. and also switch audio routings between various pedals.
The Zoia indeed has a bunch of fun looper patches on Patchstorage.
For practicing on guitar/violin however I turn to my Akai Headrush 2, which I bought for $80. I just like the simplicity of looping a short chord progression for practicing melody lines.
You could add Strymon TimeLine to that list. Excellent looper on it that is fully automatable over Midi (I used to send it CCs from DT to start looping, overdub, reverse, etc). Rock solid timing. Plus you get one of the best delay units on the market as a bonus.
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I thought the Expander could be USB powered alternatively? That’s the power connector anyway, a USB B port, right?
Yes, there’s a power connector. But I lost the AC adapter and cable that came with it.
Without a computer there is no other means of powering the Softstep 2 + Expander other than the AC adapter. All my live shows w/ Octatrack and Softstep 2 were computerless.
I need to put my hands back into it before I do. But it’s got some great potential for sure.
Yeah, that might be a good option. I was really interested when it first came out, but kind of forgot about it. What’s the max looping time? That is definitely a dealbreaker on a lot of loopers. I think 2 minutes would be a minimum, but definitely prefer more.
Very cool. This seems like a pretty good option for experimentation. I didn’t mention it in my first post, but I am primarily interested in this for ambient guitar work (although I’ll use it with plenty of other things too), so the more ways to mess with the recorded audio the better. Having both smooth and stepped control of the pitch is really interesting and sound like it could be used in a lot of situations. The Infinity doesn’t to any type of time stretching though, right?
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Yeah, I really love the features on this one, but the combo of not being stereo and limited loop length are frustrating. If I had an infinitely deep bag of money I would have pre-ordered it the second it went on Kickstarter.
Correct, no time-stretch available on the Infinity.
Also another thing of note, in case you decide to acquire this looper. The Infinity Looper frustrated me at first because it seemed like I needed to set the length multiplier for the second Loop before recording the first loop. It bothered me a lot because I didn’t yet know what content the first loop would have before recording it (in certain situations) - which of course made it impossible to know what length the second loop length should be since I was wanting to improvise. Later I found out that the second loop can be whatever length you want, you don’t need to set the multiplier in advance… that’s just if you want it to have the pedal automatically close the loop for you. It is deeply configurable. Read the manual a lot!
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Cool. It definitely looks interesting. I think I’m leaning pretty hard on the Boomerang at this point. Seems like the function to price ratio is the best. The Looperlative is still super enticing, but there is not very much talk about it, and it seems like a big leap to make for something that goes for $900.
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