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Re: ANYONE KNOW THE MIDI PEDAL SCHEME FOR THE ECHOPLEX?



At 12:46 AM -0500 1/26/98, ENAT21213 wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>Thanks to Kim for his time and patience with me.
>
>How about if the echoplex pedalboard was designed to contain 9 extra 
>buttons
>that would access loops 1 thru 9.I believe this would solve this tap up or
>down to get to a desired loop problem.

I'd really like to encourage you to try the way the echoplex interface does
work, first. The tapping "problem" really isn't a problem at all when you
are familiar with how it works. In some respects, it actually turns out to
be far more powerful than the simple triggering method you are using now.
And it uses a lot less stage area than you are currently using, which was a
design goal for it. The whole point of that part of the interface design is
to allow easy and reasonably fast access to any loop while only requiring
one extra button instead of nine, basically to take care of people with
situations like yours.

This is possible because we can take advantage of the other switches,
briefly giving them new functions when the user wants to switch loops. With
the "confirm" mode on, you don't listen to the loops you don't want, you
just go directly to the one you do. In my experience, I usually know what
loop I'm going to in advance of when I actually need to switch, and I can
usually have it ready to jump there in less than a second without really
needing to concentrate on it much. Personally, I find this much better than
having a whole other pedal taking up space in front of me, and I find it
works just as well.

The thing that makes it incredibly useable, which you can't do with simple
triggering, is I can dictate what happens when I jump to the new loop. In
addition to just playing the new loop, I can switch and have it immediately
recording something new, or overdubbing onto an existing loop, or copying
the loop I left into the new one while I add new things to it, or just copy
the length of the previous one. All of this I can control very quickly,
with a minimum of tapping.

We did spend a huge amount of time thinking about this, trying it out, and
bouncing the ideas of a lot of other musicians to make sure it would come
out nicely. Again, I encourage you to first try the way it DOES work rather
than trying to force it into a less useful model, and then make up your
mind.

>You could have buttons 1 thru 9 on the
>top row and the  record,undo ect. buttons on the bottom row(or vice 
>versa)of
>the pedalboard.This would save alot of stage space.I really would love to 
>get
>an echoplex but its looking like I will have to spend around $885
>bucks(echoplex,pedalboard and a$100 for a midi pedal that will work) to 
>get
>the echoplex to work for me the way I need it to.

Well thanks for the suggestion, we do appreciate them and much of what we
do is derived from feedback we get from users. This would make the pedal
significantly larger and more expensive, which most people would not like
very much. It also would not be compatible with the existing echoplex
hardware and require some special cable. And unfortunately, Aurisis is a
very small operation, and I'm afraid we simply don't have resources to
devote towards making every old thing and every special circumstance work.
Especially something that has a readily available solution and is only
interesting to a small number of users. And since 99.999% of people who
trigger loops do so with midi note commands sent to a sampler, there's not
much motivation for us to break out of that midi interface model for
something more limited than what we have. (the jamman is the only device
I'm aware of that doesn't trigger loops in this way.) We would much prefer
to spend our limited time and money developing new features that we hope
people will find interesting, rather than endlessly testing and adjusting
what we've got to make sure it works with everything that was made in the
last 15 years!

If you are really into triggering loops, I'd suggest you follow the crowd
and find some way to send midi-note commands. That way you will not only be
able to trigger loops on the echoplex, but other loop oriented devices you
may decide to use, like samplers and such. You'll have a lot more
versatility and options if you have more midi commands at your disposal,
and if you are going to follow this direction, you will probably want to
make this change at some point anyway. There are many controller devices
you could choose from: keyboards, drum triggers, more sophisticated midi
pedals, etc. As some consolation, the echoplex also supports use of
continuous controller messages for loop triggering, in addition to its use
of midi notes.


>Or mabey you and Oberheim
>could design a program change friendly echoplex?Now this would be cool 
>then I
>could use my ancient ada midi pedals.Till then I gess I'l keep looping 
>with my
>jamman.

An Echoplex controlled by program change messages from two ADA pedals like
you have it would not be able to do a lot of it's functions. An Echoplex
controlled by a single simple program change pedal (like the DMC Ground
Control) would do even less. Even worse to me, the interface which makes
the Loop software elegant and simple to use disappears and it becomes much
less musically intuitive. You really wouldn't have much reason to upgrade
this setup to an Echoplex, since you wouldn't have access to many of the
interesting advanced features in Loop and the musicality that people seem
to enjoy so much would be less available. If we released a version of Loop
that somehow made every feature in your Echoplex controllable by program
change messages, you would need to add one or two more ADA pedals to use
it! And that would be so impossible to use that you'd hardly find it
satisfying. On the other hand, if you were to learn to use the echoplex's
carefully designed pedal (or get one of several midi pedal that are capable
of emulating it, or even build your own plex pedal, it's not hard) you
would have one less pedal on stage than you do now and a much nicer musical
experience....

This is a frustrating situation to deal with, because some people using
looping devices have unfortunately been given the expectation that looping
can be controlled via midi in a ridiculously simple fashion. As more
powerful looping devices become available, this approach breaks down very
quickly. What happens when there are 32 or 64 loops available instead of 9?
And many more functions to use on them? And 128 different patches to select
between? Do you still want to control that completely with a single midi
command? It'll be impossible! Now, if you were to buy any synthesizer, or a
sampler, or recording system with midi-based transport control, or even a
very simple drum machine, you would never assume that it could be totally
controlled by just midi program change messages. So why would you expect
the echoplex or any other looping device to operate that way?

Midi is a sort of language, and when you use a device that can only speak a
very small subset of the words you have to accept that you can only
communicate to other devices in a very limited fashion. It's as if someone
were to open up your vocabulary and remove everything but the prepositions.
No nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or even gerunds. Your ability to
communicate with the world would then be impossibly limited, and you would
not be able to do most of the things you can normally do. You wouldn't even
be able to form thoughts about what you might do. That's the sort of box
you would stick your echoplex in if you limit it completely to midi program
change....I find that appalling, and would rather not disappoint people
with something like that, which would be way below our standards for a good
interface. That is why I remain unconvinced about the whole idea. (That and
my opinion that this use would violate the midi standard's definition of
program change.)

My opinion is that we would rather not introduce it at all if it will just
cause more inconsistencies and problems later. In this case, it will
already cause a lot of conflicts with other features likely to be in the
next versions of Loop based products. And for the versions after that, we
would just have to remove it again, which would just be a bigger hassle
than never introducing it in the first place. Our goal is to do what we can
now to maintain consistency with the future, so that we don't end up with
even worse legacy problems down the road. In this case, we will most
probably be reserving midi program change for it's intended purpose of
changing programs.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
http://www.annihilist.com/  | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com