Earlier this year I got a good deal on a Boss Loop Station for $150. I tried it out a couple times but quickly realized that as a budding one-man digital artist, I was already relying quite a bit on my computer for beats and synths. The beats in particular were very difficult to sync up with the Boss Looper and I decided to look into alternatives. For digital loopers running in linux there are few choices, and the two that really stand out in form and function are free-wheeling and sooper looper. After looking at the two, I decided sooper looper would better fit my needs. However, it is important that I may keep my hands available for playing instruments and I had to ensure I could control sooper looper's midi-bindings through a inexpensive foot-pedal. After some research, I found that many folks found the Behringer FCB-1010 to work very well for this purpose and it was reasonably priced. I got one for $149 and then sold my Boss for $150 so it worked out well. The FCB-1010 has 10 digital banks of 10 physical pedals giving 100 addressable midi-bindings. It also has two rocker foot-pedals to control volume or similarly modulated effects. For my purposes, I use 5 of the 10 banks to control 10 midi-bindings for 5 different loops in sooper looper. Sooper Looper is a bit complicated but has lots of nice features. I have finally configured it in an efficient manner so that all my loops sync to the JACK transporter which is controlled by the Hydrogen drum-sequencer. In this way I can effectively quantize recorded loops to the length of the drum-sequence cycle.
As it stands now my live-looping setup consists of JACK, Hydrogen, SooperLooper and ZynAddSubFx. I also of course use guitar and I'm starting to experiment more with voice recording.
11.04.2010
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