for worship

A long time ago, a friend of mine had what I think was an Ale­sis SR-16 drum machine.

I don’t remem­ber if the sounds in it where any good–I know we only played around with the ones that actu­ally sounded like drums.

But it had the COOLEST fea­ture. For each drum pat­tern, there were a cou­ple other pat­terns. And if you hooked up a momen­tary footswitch, when you wacked the switch, it’d play a fill and drop into the next pattern.

On beat.

THAT’S a fea­ture I want in my loop­ing software–I want to cue up two or three pat­terns (actu­ally 4 would be perfect–a click to start the song, a verse, a cho­rus and a bridge), then be able to switch to a dif­fer­ent pat­tern just by hit­ting button.

The trick is, you should be able to hit the but­ton BEFORE the loop ends and have it switch to the next loop once that loop ends.

So tonight I went on a quest for that fea­ture. And ended up with a lit­tle round-up of live loop­ing soft­ware for Linux.

Hydro­gen

I use Hydro­gen to write most of the drum loops I use on Sun­day morn­ing. It’s not bad for putting loops together (a more nor­mal, GTK-based UI would be more usable, but it’s not bad).

But Hydro­gen is just not designed for live per­for­mance. There’s no easy way to switch songs or switch tracks and there’s no real con­trols that would be use­ful on the fly, out­side of a desk-style mixer for the dif­fer­ent instru­ments in the drum bank you have loaded.

And hon­estly, I don’t trust its drum bank/sample man­ag­ment sys­tem to always load the right sounds when you’re scram­bling to get the next song cued up.

Not bad for sequenc­ing. Not at all use­ful for live use.

Soop­er­Looper

Soop­er­Loops is a pretty cool tool, designed to do what I even­tu­ally want to do: cap­ture loops live on stage. It works well and is dang stable–I’ve never had any crash­ing. Being able to drop a loop into half speed is really handy.

It also has some crazy sync fea­tures that I haven’t fig­ured out yet–there’s a LOT of tick­boxes and options with names like “mute quant”, “odub quant” and “repl quant.” No clue what most of these do.

The real prob­lem is chang­ing songs, or even loops w/in the song, is tough.Cueing up a whole set’s worth of tracks is a bad idea–if you hit solo once on any of the tracks, all the other tracks start play­ing on mute and there’s no ‘stop all’ but­ton. Hit solo twice, and every track you’ve got will start playing!

And because you don’t get any sort of indi­ca­tion on each track (SL calls each track a ‘loop’), it can get real con­fus­ing real fast about which track is play­ing and which you need to use next if you’ve got more than one or two loops.

If I could fig­ure out how to get rid of loops (ie. tracks) when I’m done with them, I think it’d be a lot bet­ter. You could have a track or two play­ing, then cue up the tracks for the next song, start them when it was time, then get the old stuff out of your way.

Until I fig­ure that out, I’m left won­der if Soop­er­Looper is quite the right tool for the job.

Kluppe

Kluppe is another very cool live loop­ing tool like Soop­er­Looper. It has this awe­some back’n’forth mode that plays the loop nor­mally, and then imme­di­ately runs it backwards–very awe­some (whether or not it’s use­ful is another mat­ter, but that’s nei­ther here nor there).

And while adding new loops is par­tic­u­larly unin­tu­tive (you’ll fig­ure out the dif­fer­ence between a buffer and looper even­tu­ally), it seems to han­dle mul­ti­ple tracks fairly well–it labels them and has a decent track man­age­ment UI.

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not par­tic­u­larly sta­ble. It crashed on me sev­eral times while open­ing files, chang­ing modes, etc. I have no idea what ver­sion I’m run­ning (if the info’s not in the ‘about’ dia­log, how would I find out?), but the most recent ver­sion was released a year ago, so I’m not sure where that puts me, beyond not feel­ing com­fort­able using it live on stage.

Mixxx

This is basi­cally a glo­ri­fied DJ mixer via soft­ware. With the addi­tion of some solid sync fea­tures, this could be really cool.

Unfor­tu­nately, the only sync but­ton just tries to match tem­pos, which isn’t really what I want–I want an easy way to match up the begin­ning and end of each loop. A sim­ple “start both play­ing at the same time” would work for this. But I can’t fig­ure that out.

With some prac­tice, this could be a decent tool–the media library inte­gra­tion is a really nice fea­ture (as is the abil­ity to set up a play­back queue and have the track roll to the next song in the queue when it finishes–that solves the ‘mas­sive pause between songs while I load up the next loop’ problem).

But with­out beginning/end sync, it just doesn’t solve the other problem–being able to flip to a new loops easily.

Sum­mary

I tried sev­eral other pro­grams as well, including: