I recently started working on a project to make Ableton Live work like a hardware looper for my friend Randy Craig. He currently utilizes the Roland RC-50 and a Byzantine series of pedals and we are trying to eliminate some of the complexity he currently has in his setup. In the process of figuring out how to do it I have discovered that it is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve for the way Randy works without making some pretty dramatic concessions due to the lack of an overdub feature in Live and a real-time reverse functionality. Live is truly amazing software and there are a lot of artists that use it for live looping; however, to make it behave like a hardware looper requires some cleverness and some concessions. Anyway, I am looking into writing software to do exactly what Randy wants in MAX/MSP and in the process found what you see below. It’s so robotic sounding and yet so organic. It just goes to show that the Rhodes and Wurli are such flawless instruments that even a sample of one of them can make robots sound beautiful.
I will keep you posted on the results of Randy’s looper and when we get it working I’ll post video. It seems to be a difficult problem to solve as there really is nothing on the market that works quite right for anyone. If you have a solution, let me know.
