seq24

I have been interested in and revisited seq24 a few times over the past year or so. Each time, however, I was apparently overwhelmed by its simplicity and could not make heads or tails of it since there is little to no documentation on it. However, I now have a much better grasp having followed a Dave Phillips tutorial from here. Now I am starting to realize the potential of this excellent little midi loop sequencer. Although it would take some time to get it set-up, I'm thinking of using seq24, standalone or with sooperlooper as an addition to my live looping set.

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.

SL-010

SL-007

RPM 2011

RPM 2011 is underway and I have gotten a slight head start in hopes that I can make a more professional looking product this year than a CD-R with Sharpie labeling. My focus this year is to use completely open-source software and my strategy for a workflow is to spend an hour or so 3 nights a week to "get my groove on" using my live looping set-up and then dump the loops to my DAW (Ardour2) and paint my picture there. I have found this has been a very efficient workflow for me given my often debilitating time constraints.

You may take notice of two new tracks to the left where I have used this strategy: SL-007 and hangman01. Tonight Elia helped me with SL-007 by accompanying me on synths. The process took about 30ish minutes to grab a few loops and then about an hour to arrange, add automation and mix to generate the recording. hangman01 has some computer artifact blips that I don't like so I will have to remix at some point.

SooperLooper and Behringer FCB-1010

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.