Live Looping

About 2 years ago now I happened across a webisode of KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" featuring Theresa Andersson who blew me away with all the music she made "flying solo." She explained on the show that she uses a combination of "loop pedals" to accomplish her complex artistic expression. I started thinking about how I might be able to do something similar and as mentioned in an earlier post, I bought and tested a Boss Loop Station which I ultimately traded in for a more flexible solution to meet my needs: combining a Behringer FCB1010 with Jesse Campbell's SooperLooper software.

I have now been working with this set-up for a few months and I am really starting to put together all the puzzle pieces. I have learned (partially) how to program the FCB1010 so that I am currently able to use the one pedal to MIDI-control SooperLooper, Rakarrack (a nice digital effects pedal), and Hydrogen drum machine. I also have a small, old, simple but excellent (it was a free gift) MIDI keyboard that I connect to ZynAddSubFX and Qsynth routing different sounds on 7 channels (for now). Additionally I run my Les Paul and a 3/4 size bass I got as a gift (thanks Sadie) through separate channels (L and R) into an ART USB DualPre which is my "off-board" sound-card / preamp.

It took me a long time to figure out how all these different softwares work together, alone, with MIDI, etc. but now I'm getting results (clips below). SooperLooper is great and I really like how it syncs with Hydrogen and quantizes to my drum-loop. I only wish Hydrogen had some more MIDI bindings (like switching patterns which I cannot get to work) and that there was a linux equivalent for midistroke (Mac).

edit: I discovered a "secret feature" in Hydrogen. It seems that it will allow for selection/deselction of the patterns (1 - n from top to bottom) using MIDI program-change (PC) commands 01 - n. I programmed my FCB1010 to send PC-01 - PC-04 at bank 08 where I control the muting of Hydrogen and Sooperlooper, only it sends on a separated channel so that PC-01 - 04 are still free for Rakarrack to use.

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