nowtime wrote:Well;
Looking at these numbers so far, 1400 hits and 57 votes, we can assume that an Ableton Looper is not a very popular idea. Quite surprising, actually. Perhaps y'all do not know what you're missing.
I have come back to read this thread at least 10 times, just to see what was being said. So I wouldn't derive too much from the 'read vs voted' ratio.
On the subject of looping in the clip, in the way that KidBeyond does ... it's important to note that this removes the ability to have old loops fade out. The benefit of the delay based looper is that the riff you played 16 bars ago can be more quiet and more muffled than the most recent riff you played.
There are many more benefits to delay, or buffer based looping. I have a large development document here which details all my experiments in features for loopers and my thoughts on what is useful and why, so I will copy a few segments out.
Here are some extracts from my looper development notes
edited a bit so it makes a little sense to other people
I wrote: undo
There are problems with 'undo' on loopers and a couple of ways to tackle it, neither are completely satisfactory.
To explain the practicalities to the uninitiated; audio loops are not the same as midi, audio is contiguous data not individual 'notes'.
Pressing undo cannot magically undo the last audio note you played, the audio must undo back to some arbitrary point in the sample .. but which point, the bar start? This is problematic because quite often sound is fading out from the previous bar, so if you delete the current bar of audio when the loop plays back around you will very likely hear a weird moment where the audio suddenly cuts off. It's not nice.
The other method is a layer based approach, which is slightly better but more memory intensive. The audio is recorded as one loop of many overdubs or passes, but several layers can be created by the musician. Undo will remove the most recent layer. This is better ... but if you made a mistake in the 3rd pass on a layer then 'undo' will remove the whole of that layer which can be quite jarring.
Undo horrors in use:
a 4bar loop is recorded with 3 passes to get a nice fat sound, after a while another layer is added to add a little variation to the loop. The musician then switches to 'non-record' mode and plays a little bit of an 8 bar solo over the top of the loop, unknown to them they didn't press the pedal hard enough and the solo is now in the loop, pressing undo will remove the entire layer. Argh.
Undo solutions considered
Using Both types of delete? Implementing both bar delete and layers may be possible, but it's a little unweildy and could be confusing. But perhaps it is simply a matter of clear labeling and GUI segmentation.
transient based undo? undo back to the last note (via transient peak) is unlikely to work correctly in real world situations and requires soem tricky buffer handling to acheive. It may be possible, but I haven't tried implementing it!
on general features
General Features
Some features I have experimented with and have investigated
Sustain / Fade
This is simply the feedback control which sends the output of the buffer back to the input of the buffer, via any other processing I have thrown in the signal path. Fading out the older audio gives the ability to slowly progress the loop into new sonic terrain and prevents the sense of being 'stuck' in a loop. Fading helps give prominence to the most recent phrases without having to manually control a mix. Fading automatically sets previous passes to be 'background material' to your most recent input in the simplest functionally possible way.
Loop Filter / EQ
to stop everything being 'at the front of the loop' a lowpass filter is essential, 12db per octave (or less) is adequate, any steeper is too severe.
A hi-pass is quite useful to tidy up low frequencies and used in tandem with the lowpass filter it can help to sit older loops further back in the sound space.
A full EQ such as EQ8 can be quite interesting to 'carve' sound on each pass, especially when paired with a harmonic generation techinque like a waveshaping device or a ring modulation. An Eq can pick out the artificial harmonics created and 'mix them'. Doing this creates some really interesting synthetic audio spaces which would be hard or even impossible to create otherwise.
stereo widen :
A small buffer read offset for each side is quite useful as it can help to make loops more pad-like and less 'in your face' . I use negative value on one side and a positive on the other to keep the average 'on tempo'. There is an issue that looping of the small delay offsets (used for widening) will exponentially increase over many minutes to create an out-of-time stereo picture, but this is usually not an issue in the cases when widening is applied so heavily as to be evident. In those cases it is normally desirable to create a large and wide audio mush !
When widen is combined with fading and high-frequency roll-off a deep and almost orchestral soundscape can be easilly created.
Phase based (allpass) widen might seem a better option than linear delay based, but I found delay to be adequate and any low frequency issues can be fixed with the loop eq controls.
on some more impressive abilities
Chopping & Changing
retriggering from any point in the loop can restructure the loop immediately, a bit like a very controlable 'beat repeat' ... because any manual stuttering or chopping actions you take with the playback will be recorded into the audio loop itself and repeated indefinitely.
For example - while a loop of drums is playing, if you suddenly move the the 'playhead' index back to a prior snare drum position and hear that audio played back, the 'record head' will record that snare into the loop. This is a great way of creating odd beats and rhythms on the fly.
To help acheive this it is necessary to provide buttons which can move the play head to specific points in the loop, Live has the ability to map a key range to certain actions and this would be the best method. Mapping a key range to the 'play from here' marker in the looper would enable performers to map 16 keys to a bar and know that key 4 will be 1/4 of the way through the loop and key 8 will restart the playhead from 1/2 way through the loop.
"while held" is the best method for this. When the key is released the playhead should leap back to where it ought to be.
it continues like that for many pages!
I have to make notes like this, or I will forget what I have already tried.