Hello, my name is Looptron.

Not enough loop in my tron.

So I've been having some problems. Nothing major, but I've pretty much shifted the focus (for now) to performing the tunes live, and a lot of that basically involves sampling some piece of source audio (guitar, vocal, thingamagoop, harmonica.... maybe) on the fly at a given point in the arrangement and then looping it. The resulting loops are then effected, selected, infected or neglected in the subsequent arrangement according to taste.

To achieve this so far I've been using the loop recorder in Guitar Rig (which is nice but doesn't seem to save it's controller parameters with preset - grrrrrrr) and the various delay effects that are available in Ableton (which are good but tend to have a 16-beat time limit).

What I need is a plug-in with the following functionality:

1. Tempo sync to host
2. Ability to set the length of the sample (in beats/bars).
3. Ability to control the output via an envelope.
4. "Sample Now" trigger. This'll sample from the beginning of the next bar for the prescribed length then immediately play back the looped sample. If a sample is already in memory and this trigger fires again the current sample is replaced with the new one.
5. Start/Stop playback trigger. Stops or restarts playback of the loop.
6. The ability to mute the input audio from the output once playback commences. Or not.

Nice to have:

• ability to timestretch/detune the input sample to a different output (i.e. sample over 4 bars, play back over 8 or 16).
• ability for playback to appear elsewhere in the stereo field to the input. (ping pong?)

I can't find anything on t'interwebs that'll seem to do the job (to be fair it's not an application that people are likely to use apart from me). As such, given my geeky background, I'm gonna roll my own. Never developed a plug-in before. Or done any audio programming.

I guess I've got some reading to do.

Bit-crush-esque.

Arlington Road was on telly last night and I've always meant to sit down and watch it. Alas, the shit nasty head cold I've got interfered so I went into my room full of musical tunes some rhymes some jingles lots of them are good ones lets go into the other room and make them work.

(We miss you, Syd.)

Anyhow, managed to get a nice little beat going, and a dark angular little guitar part, and used the lyrics I wrote that are tentatively called Ten Times Over and set up an envelope on a delay to grab the "ten times over" lyric  from the chorus and loop it and run it through a resonator while the guitar is having a nasty filtered bit-crush-esque breakdown. (Bit-crush-esque? My new fave adjective.) By the end of the movie the first verse and chorus was actually good enough to play  and sing it (with laptop accompaniment) to my girlfriend.

And she liked it.

(And I don't think she was just saying it.)

Two wins in the same week. I'm on a roll. When the snot subsides I'll do a version and post it.

Pound for a brown.

I'm doing a shitty install job at work and while I'm sat here greybarring I thought I'd upload what little I had of the new looptron.com site. Let's face it - the one that was there was completely borked. This one ain't pretty, lacks content (yet) and probably has too much brown in it to be cool but at least it works.

For those RSS feed reader types among you you can see it at www.looptron.com - assuming you can be arsed to click that far.

The New Clear Zone

Yeah, yeah, I know.....long time no post. (Been saying that a lot lately.)

That said, after what appears to have been a successful debut appearance with Cassette last Thursday (first time I've used Guitar Rig onstage too!) and no further gigs or rehearsals until January with either them or Moeker I'm free to work on Looptron stuff pretty much exclusively in the meantime.

Over the weekend that meant starting to throw together some rough templates for a new looptron.com site (see awful attached screen capture). Wasn't really planning on it coming out all retro and brown, and everything could change but it's a step in the right direction.

(How many artists can claim to have hand built their own website, I wonder? Geeeeeeeeek. Although I'm gonna get in trouble when someone from Moeker reads this cos I should probably be working on that site. If you are a member of Moeker reading this, this site is REALLY simple and is 98% CSS. Not like Timmay's complex graphical monstrosity. Much easier.)

The other thing, which I've been doing this evening for the first time, is proving that I can gig using the MacBook Pro running Ableton, the XioSynth and the Rig Kontroller for Guitar Rig. And a guitar and a mic, of course. I've successfully had it sampling vocals and guitar input simultaneously (while playing a synthesised backing drum part and bassline). It's also possible to configure envelopes against the input tracks so you can just pull out fractions of a phrase or line and loop just that bit, have it reappear at pre-defined moments, etc. 

Running one instance of Impulse (Ableton's drum machine), one Operator (the software synth), Guitar Rig and a whole bunch of audio effects didn't push the CPU beyond 25% at any point that I saw. Still have some (minor) latency issues to sort out, but this is all very, very doable. In fact, it may mean I have enough spare capacity that I can record the input performance audio and MIDI every time I play - no show unrecorded! As long as I can keep everything running in RAM the fairly slow disk I/O shouldn't be a problem.

And best of all, I can just leave the whole lot set up in the studio for the next few weeks to experiment. Bliss!

For the first time in weeks this feels like it's going somewhere...