Advanced Looping and Real-Time Sampling Technology
Looping serves for having fun, improvising, composing, training, teaching and therapy.
Loops can be used to repeate a simple phrase a few times or elaborate extremely complex and variating orchestral or clustered sounds. It will change the way music is recorded in the studios as well!
Loops alter the mind and can be addictive. No counter indications have been found yet!
Loop is the technology driving the highly acclaimed Gibson/Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro, after many years still the most desired and copied looping instrument on the market.
LOOP was the first technology dedicated to Live Looping. Not even the Record Button existed before, and many of the over 30 other functions have never been copied. Its a classic. It made the same hardware box sell during 12 years. Many built their music on it with input from Loopers-Delight.com which turned into the school for looping.
Read a 2006 GuitarPlayer review about Looping which clearly shows how the movement started.
We collected a lot of wishes and experiences on meeting with the most creative musicians and implemented them them during 10 years, and many more ideas are not yet implemented.
LOOP is based on one continuous sound memory where the whole history of the song is recorded. It is not about assembling sound bits but about travelling in time. Even when loops were made with tapes, there were two kinds: glued together loop of fixed length (nowadays made with samples) and the two head technique. Digitally, both can be mixed. While we had to struggle to put markers into our continuous loop to make functions like sync and retrigger possible, all the other loop technologies are struggling to implement the functions that come out very simple and fluent with our continuous memory structure. With the sample structure, the bars of the rhythm tend to turn into a prison, but LOOP can easily ignore or move such marks, and any bits of the continuous sound can be reinterpreted as a new rhythm. Loops can run out of time and then back in time again.
The creator always played with other looping musicians and observed their intuitions and reaction and thus could adapt the user interface, which started completely unique as well. With longpress and crossfunctions (start with one button and end with another) the maximum was made immediately accessible with the 7 switches that can be reasonably lined up on the ground for foot operation. The pleasure to operate a intuitive machine is in the details and the selection of the functions that are really needed. Users call LOOP *deep*.
Playing together also made several sync functions necessary that competitors neglected. Maybe the time was not ripe, as the musicians first become fascinated to be able to play alone. But there is a movement towards meeting and playing together. So far mostly unsynced and thus not rhythmically and thus experimental sounding. BrotherSync is our revolutionary proposal to sync in both directions and also developed further and could turn into a standard so that any musicians can meet and groove loopy (see my sound samples).
Mathons' Chop technology to recognize notes can be applied to adapt the loops to the actual playing and vary the loops in many more musical ways.
Collaboration with Gibson was difficult and the support for the Echoplex was tiny and the price high.
There was a 5 years break in the history due to management errors.
It is easy to bring this unique software back to the market on current hardware technology.
We rewrote it in C++ in a structure that can easily expand into all the new functions we keep collecting.
Its easy to make the software work as multiple tracks - which is the main advantage of the competitors like Electrix Repeater or Boss RC-50.
Limited options to change the loop in real time is not a problem for most beginners, but as they learn, they become interested in a deeper product. In other words we can convince the widely spread RC-20 and JamMan users to upgrade to LOOP5.
If up to now nobody had the courage to copy our continuous memory structure, although we explained it openly, it is not very likely that it happens soon.
Loop represents years of development by Aurisis Research in musical, state of the art, looping instruments. It provides unique, inherently musical functionality for real-time sampling, all wrapped in an easy to use interface. With Loop, as with any good musical instrument, the musician can focus on the performance and the music, and forget about the technology.
Guitar Player editor James Rotondi calls Aurisis' Loop technology, as implemented in the Echoplex, “...An incredible practice tool, a great compositional aid, an instant, stress-free mirror for your imagination, and a potentially limitless source of fun....” (GP, Sept 1995) Ernie Rideout, of Keyboard, says, “With the longest loops in the biz, this box is a live composition dynamo. Plus, it’s a gas to use.” (Keyboard, July 1995) Electronic Musician adds, “Overall, this is a powerful, inherently musical device, the best of its kind at the moment. It’s a must-have if you like working with loops.” (EM, August 1995)
The buzz on looping has grown tremendously over the past years. Musician magazines like Guitar Player mention the technique regularly. Guitar Player even had a feature article by “loop guru” David Torn. Loop based musics like Hip-Hop, Techno, Dub, Acid Jazz, Ambient, and Drum and Bass have come to dominate popular music all over the world, inpiring more and more musicians to add loops to their music. Loop is the answer!
Musicians in nearly every genre are adopting loopers as an integral part of their music, from rock to bluegrass to jazz to ethnic/worldbeat to film composers to hip-hop, techno, the avant-garde and much more. Guitarists, DJ’s, percussionists, synthesists, vocalists, remix artists, composers, horn players and more are employing looping in performances and compositions.
On the Internet, the Looper’s Delight web site and mailing list was inaugerated in September of 1996 as a discussion forum and informational resource for the art of Looping in music. It now receives over 4000 visitors a day and is enjoying a rapid growth rate. Most of the information on the site and the work done to create it is donated by users throughout the world. Visit Looper’s Delight and witness all the Loop enthusiasm for yourself!