[LAU] composing live w/ loops

Olivier Guilyardi ml at xung.org
Fri May 1 05:52:00 EDT 2009


Hi Josh,

Josh Lawrence wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a good friend who is a rapper, and he wants to get together and
> do some collaboration and make some jams.  I'd like to get everyone's
> take on how they would do this with Linux.  My thought process is
> this:  Find a few drum loops that are tasty prior to the session, and
> start those playing.  Then, maybe record a bassline (synth), some
> comping (my hardware keyboard), etc.  Having the ability to turn these
> loops on/off to build a track would be nice.

I think you could give a try to Jackbeat. I released version 0.7.0 yesterday,
but my announce is taking more time to reach LAA than I expected..

Jackbeat is very easy to use and 0.7 features some new handy shortcuts. In
regard to turning loops on and off, you may want to take a look at the "I Want
To Leave High" demo on the MusicExamples page. It starts with most tracks muted.
Then moving around with the arrow keys and pressing M you can very quickly
enable disable some of them. I think it could be a great start for your live
setup. Or you could take a look at the other demos which are more drummachine-like.

http://jackbeat.samalyse.org
http://jackbeat.samalyse.org/wiki/MusicExamples

> My problem is I can't think of the right combination of applications
> to do this.  My synths are dssi...what app could handle the looping
> portion?  Does Ardour support loops yet?  Maybe some funky combination
> of sooperlooper and something else?  I don't mind doing some
> planning/setup prior to the session, but I need to be able to get to
> things rather quickly so I don't hold my rapper up waiting on me to
> figure out how to work things.  :)

Jackbeat mainly operates on audio files, but OSC is now also supported. So you
could record your synth parts to wav files and then load them in Jackbeat. Or,
you can use the OSC methods and events, to either respond to incoming start
events or trigger an external synth.

> Any and all ideas are welcome, as I have never used Linux in a live
> jam situation before.

Jackbeat is still a simple little app, but I think it can already be quite
helpful for live jamming.

--
  Olivier



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