(Undskyld til mine danske læsere for dette lidt nørdet engelske indlæg)
I actually had SooperLooper on my computer for a while now, and finaly I decided I should get a setup done – where I could control SooperLooper through Mainstage, so I could get all the functions from Mainstage and an easy midi setup. It works really well!
My setup is as following
I got my mic running directly in to my soundcard, I use an TC Impact Twin, sounds good – but I have some latency trouble using the outputs 3 and 4, more about that later. In mainstage I have an input channel where the mic enters, the mic channel sends the master and to bus 4 which leads to a channel where I have SooperLooper set up. The bus sends 1-3 is reverb, delay and tape delay. In the mic channel I have first a regular EQ, then Lowender (my bass plug) and then another EQ which is optimized for beatboxing (with a dedicated kick lift, and less mid frequencies). On the SooperLooper track i have sends 1 and 2 (reverb and delay), and nothing more. All the sends are post.
I have connected 3 midi devices so I can control both SooperLooper and all the effects. My Pod XT Live is connected via a midi cable to my Korg padKontrol, and my Ozonic keyboard is connected through the TC Impact Twin with a firewire cable. All the midi runs smoothly, and it’s really easy to setup using Mainstage’s “Learn” function.
The pedal is kinda tricky, actually there should be an awfull lot of buttons to press – but only five of them works without interrupting anything else (don’t ask me why?), so I decided the pedal should be able to control: Record, Overwrite, Undo and then Beatbox EQ and Lowender. This is the most basic things I to be able to press without using my hands. The padKontrol then controls functions like mute loop channels 1-4, undo all (if everything goes wrong), redo, substitute, tuner, tap tempo (for delay), select loop and a lot more. For fun I have set up the XY pad on the padKontrol to control feedback and groove for the tape delay, not that usefull – but fun. The Ozonic only has one function – volume for loops, mic, reverb and delay (well actually I setup the ozonic with an organ sound just for the fun of it, but I haven’t used it yet).
Besides all the midi controls that makes me able to make music on the go, I have my Kaoss Pad connected so I can use the effects on the machine. My plan is to get Mainstage to read the tempo from SooperLooper, and then send the tempo to the KaossPad so I can do a loop in SooperLooper and the continue the loop on the KaossPad which have some other fun features than SooperLooper has. I have one problem with the KaossPad thoe, well actually the problem lies in the TC soundcard because it delays the sound with A LOT, so I cannot record to the KaossPad in tempo – that really SUCKS! Any ideers of how to solve this is most welcome.
Problems I found on the way
Actually makings this setup hasn’t been that big of a fight, when I first got started everything seemed to work (except from the delay issue on the TC). There was some problems thoe: If you are going to make loops in time using SooperLooper, you need to set it up so it syncs. I use the function “sync to Loop 1″ and then has the sync box checked on each loop (I use 4). The second problem was: what is all the functions called so I can make buttons and knobs to control it through mainstage, the one that took the most time finding was volume – I use “wet”. The thirds and last issue I can recall is that the first loop is louder than the others (remember to select loop number before you record, else it will record on all at once) – but I couldn’t get the volume difference fixed, so I just turned down the volume on the first loop so they all are equal, not the best solution I think – but it works for now.
So how does it sound?
If I may say so myself: Awesome. But you should take a listen for yourself. I still haven’t learned the perfect foot-timing, so sometimes I don’t get the whole first word in the loop – kind’a sucks, but I’ll get better along the way I believe.
