SooperLooper Quick&Dirty Demos

Screenshots and Audio samples would help keep me sane in my sad blasted zynth free world at the moment. I’m VERY interested in looping at the moment and It would give me something to look at whilst I wait to have a heavy rebuild season ( probably after BlueDot… I live 10 miles from Jodrell Bank, and Kraftwerk are playing . . .).
@Baggypants any pointers . . . ?

There will of course be patently un-enforceable requests for audio samples at almost any time in this process :face_with_monocle:

Quick feed @wyleu with some zynthian related music while I try and think of something…

I vaguely remember that normal sooperlooper has a mode where it will remain in play+pause until a threshold is passed so when you hit record nothing happens until you actually play a note. I don’t remember it being obviously available over midi though :frowning:

Edit: I should have referred to my earlier comment :smiley:

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That has a lovely optomistic feel with the descending structure;first solo has rather a Tim Blake New Jerusalem from 23:17 ; sort of feel and a lovely bass oooh I do like the swooping solo pitch end or driven by the loop?
timbre change…
re.chords played in live?

A fed wyleu . . . . . :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Ohhh! Really nice piece … could you give some details about zynthian usage? Engines, presets, snapshots, layers … also about the producing process :wink:

Thanks a lot!

I’ve not got the stuff with me, but…

The arpeggiated opening sound is an sf2 I found in the zynth somewhere, crystal-something-or-other? the strings starting at 40s are a Nois3Maker preset. The first lead at 1:20 is a simple Saw in OB-Xd put through a reverb in the zynth, probably one of the TAL ones. possibly 80’s plate preset, I can’t remember. The bass starting at 1:58 is the OB-Xd Moog Bazz patch arpeggiated from the MC-303, everything else being live recorded.

The 2nd lead at 2:43 is a patch I found for the mininova called YUMYUM. Inspired by the Osric Tentacles track The Yumyum Tree. I think it has an inverted envelope modulating pitch The decay phase causing the long drop and then release providing a quick rise at the end.

The drums were a greatly trimmed out preset patch on the MC-303.

All of this is recorded through a Behringer U222 into Ardour. Very little processing goes on apart from using the Calf Haas Stereo Enhancer plugin on the two leads and the Crystal-whatever-it-was soundfont and the Calf Bass Enhancer on the Drums and the Bass.

Only one layer was recorded at a time. What I typically do is have a snapshot for each synth and then a bunch of subsnapshots for my favourite presets for that engine.

Sooper Looper added as effect to Fluid Viola patch…

Tried it with DX and lost the controlls for sooper looper down in th bottom of the parameter selector. . . :smiley:

So where does one go from here … ?

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Someone has learn to use the scrot tool :wink:
P.S. I love the name

@mheidt, regarding the original subject, “SooperLooper”, as you can see, there is an open issue in the tracking system for integrating the full SooperLooper version. Currently we are using the LV2 version, that is old and quite limited. I wouldn’t invest too much time with it and would look forward for the full version.

Although it’s a big amount of work, integrating the full version should be very straight forward. The software is splited in a server and the GUI, that communicates using a well documented OSC protocol …

Some volunteer for enjoying an interesting and very funny integration? :wink:

Kind Regards,

Bumping this, because I am interested if anyone managed to get the full sooperlooper to run on Zynthian, or if there is any recipe for installing it by now ? Or is there any looper that is already part of Zynthian and works well (including overdub and live recording).

If the current plan with the UI yields good results we might be able to undertake this kinds of integrations in a way more modular manner, meaning it would become actually feasible to make this happen. I don’t wanna say anything because I’m not gonna go into exactly this but a decent looper is definitely in my list.

I just ran across a little report on the history of SooperLooper by EnKerli in another forum:

“While MOD is mentioned as the developer of SooperLooper in the plugin itself, it’s a version MOD has ported , forked from the brunogola plugin version , which is itself based on the old Jesse Chappell LADSPA plugin of the standalone SooperLooper by the very same Jesse Chappell, aka Sonosaurus .”

The Face of Standalone SooperLooper

Amendment:
One looper experimenter said the Sooperlooper is based on the Gibson EDP-4 (Echoplex Digital Pro Plus) rev 4 software was used in 2001-2007 versions.
(It had an optional 7 button, near 19" wide foot controller)


A 11:20 review of the Echoplex features and history.

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We should develop a dedicated engine for this. SooperLooper engine’s core is OSC controlled and GUI-less, perfect for zynthian. There is a "feature request " in our tracking system from a long time ago:

Regards,

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SooperLooper LV2 is available on Zynthian but is very limited, effectively useless. There is a looper called ALO which works quite well bit had a few limitations and issues but is the most functional one I have found in Zynthian. It has 6 separate, one-time record loops so if you want to overdub you use another loop. It syncs to house clock and can be MIDI controlled. I have reported some issues and when I find time may submit some PRs upstream to resolve these.

SooperLooper should work well but we do need an interface. Maybe there is scope to create an interface that provides minimal control to just get it working.

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Hi riban, can you give me a hint, how I can get that click/clock working for alo looper? How does that sync work?

@sisko
you can get it via zynseq, when you play a loop, it activates the clock
Riban can explain more !

Yep! ALO can sync to clock. For some reason I can’t find the plugin on the Zynthian I have here even after searching for new plugins so I can’t check the exact workflow but you need to start the JACK clock running which is currently simplest done by starting a sequence running. You could do this with an empty sequence configured to loop if you don’t want / need to hear a loop. You can set the bar length in ZynSeq and the same quantity of beats are used in ALO. When you prime a loop for record you should hear a metronome click whose volume may be adjusted in one of the ALO control pages. Recording starts at the start of the current bar that the threshold is exceeded (I think). This can seem confusing, especially if you have configured ALO to record more than one bar. I don’t recall exactly but remember finding it difficult to register where the recording starts and hence loops. You configure the quantity of bars that will record in ALO which will be a multiple of the number of beats in a bar configured in ZynSeq. When the loop finishes recording or you are playing any loop the metronome is disabled. If you want a permanent click track you could program a zynseq loop to play a percussion instrument.

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Thanks @Tabula and @riban I will try it soon. Not very intuitiv but maybe if I have everything worked out and set up…

Agreed! The clock interface has been criticised for not being front and centre and I appreciate its operation is slightly obfuscated. I want to make it simpler to understand and use but had to implement something to get zynseq working first. It does integrate with other modules but some workflows like this need to be explored so that we can learn how best to design modules that complement each other so that we may compliment each other :slightly_smiling_face:.