The Song Fight Bulletin Board

One of the things I was excited about during my doomed expedition into Linux recording was possibly using my laptop as a live-looper and giving me more options for performing.

Linux programs that do this are <a href="http://freewheeling.sourceforge.net/">Freewheeling</a> and <a href="http://essej.net/sooperlooper/">SooperLooper</a>

Yesterday I heard about <a href="http://plasq.com/musolomo/">Musolomo</a> for Mac.

Oddly, I still haven't found anything for Windows? So what am I missing?

All I'd have to answer with is..... Live.

They have a free demo that allows you to mess around. Live 4 is awesome for live off the floor looping. Wish I owned it....

I tried Live but couldn't figure out how it worked. I wanted to give it a shot because I saw a guy named Andrew Chaikin (http://www.biggerbread.com/) do some pretty amazing live looping stuff using it. Particularly impressive was his cover of a Portishead song where he vocalised all the parts live using his mouth, including the drums, etc. and used a MIDI pedal board to control all the loops in Live. Tonetripper, do you know of any resources for people who could maybe use some guide to how to use the program?

You might try Back to basics, which seems to do the trick. It's ugly as all get out, but it does work.

Yeah, you definitely want Ableton Live. I've been playing with it a bunch lately and it's really geared towards exactly what you're looking for.

Live is SOOOOOO cool. Using Live is like dating a supermodel. Who has a PhD. In fun.

Lunkhead wrote: do you know of any resources for people who could maybe use some guide to how to use the program?

Here's a tutorial that seems pretty comprehensive. http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/02 ... intro.html

I've also found the help content in the program to be fairly good.

Live does do what it does very very well. It's a real blast to use, Live 4 in particular, letting you use vsti's, is way awesome.

Lunkhead wrote: Tonetripper, do you know of any resources for people who could maybe use some guide to how to use the program?

There is the forum which Ableton run for the users of Live.

Live Forum

I know that there are some cats around who are pretty proficient with Live. The greatest thing about Live is that you can use the looping software with midi and even record stuff through mics live off the floor. You can then even go one step further and loop those live moments and then effect them with VSTs or even DXis or whatever Apple plugins are. Then you can theoretically load in via whatever A-D converter you got going any records that you got spinning on turntables. Track them into live and effect them or beat slice..... shivers..... sweet lord thundering jesus the possibilities are endless.

There are people out there doing remixes, mastering, tracking, composing, you name it out there doing some awesome shit with Live. The other beauty is you can use it in conjunction with Cubase, Logic, and Nuendo as a rewire. Which means you can get more into wave cutting before you release back into a live looping session. Basically the program's sick. Live 4 is the bomb of looping software from my perspective. Also once you do get your head wrapped around it it just gets easier and easier to use and another nice thing about it is that everytime your mouse goes over something a little information will pop up in an information box on the, I think, left hand bottom side of the screen. It's very user friendly. It took me a while to comprehend it, but once you grasp the drag and dropping and beat slicing it pretty much rules for ease of use.

THC has that shit down cold. Check out some of his remixes TheHipCola - remixes..... I'm sure there is some 'Live' work in some of them. Just check out some of the remixes he did for remixfight.

I want to buy it. It's worth owning especially for the support although I've had a few free versions on my computers in the past, they both went belly up on me.[/sadness]

Expensive but awesome to have in the arsenal of programs. Top end from my position. A must have for live looping masterers of remixes.

craig loves live, i've used it but not quite gotten the hang of it yet.
you can also try audiomulch (free full version, shareware). i've even used acid for live looping (put on "loop mode").
-bill

Thanks a lot guys. I've got a Live install to play with now. It looks to be way more powerful than I need, but maybe I'll end up doing way more than I'd imagined.

We are creating our "Brand New Car" using Live Delta, which came free with the M-Audio box my wife got me. I've played with it only enough to know what it's for. It really is a fun tool, though I've never even considered putting on a laptop for a live performance (which is really what it's for).

Although Ableton (like the apparantly 70's-nostalgic FruityLoops UI people) are still using "dials" and "knobs" as on-screen controls which really makes no visual or motoric (mouse or keyboard) sense. That's no longer funny to me, just kind of sad. Dials are cheap, small, hearty, convenient voltage controls; computer screen pictures have no such economic, scalar, dusty, or physical limitations. Which computer programmers don't realize this?

But the rest of the interface begins to make sense after a few hours of messin' with it.

Mostess wrote: Although Ableton (like the apparantly 70's-nostalgic FruityLoops UI people) are still using "dials" and "knobs" as on-screen controls which really makes no visual or motoric (mouse or keyboard) sense. That's no longer funny to me, just kind of sad. Dials are cheap, small, hearty, convenient voltage controls; computer screen pictures have no such economic, scalar, dusty, or physical limitations. Which computer programmers don't realize this?

The ones who program the ability to map those dials to a MIDI controller.

This is a video of a guy called Kid Beyond, describing how he uses Ableton Live to do live looping for his all-beatbox routine. Fancy stuff.

That's the stage name of Andrew Chaikin, the guy I mentioned in my post near the top of the thread. I've seen him a few times, and his live looping songs are pretty mind blowing. It's cool to see him explain things in a bit more detail. I don't think the pedal in the video was the one he was using when I saw him, though, as that one had expression pedals he was using to fade loops in and out, though maybe he had macros set up for doing that or something and wasn't actually using expression pedals.

I've seen him a couple of times. The first time he was using the digital echoplex. Perhaps he has moved on to a laptop system.

Ken