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Re: Drum loops...how do you do it?



Title: Re: Drum loops...how do you do it?

Midi syncing drum box to EDP, etc. works great if you're starting your piece with the drums. Then you can slave your looper to the drum box's midi clock. But if you're going to start a piece by playing your guitar, xylophone, etc, then it's kind of tricky because you don't have a tempo to play to, unless you listen to your drum beat in headphones before you bring it up in the house mix.

so . .  what I've ended up doing most of the time is playing with everything unsynced, and tap-tempoing my drum machine to match whatever I've started playing and looping with my bass. I control the volume of drums and two chains of bass loops with 3 separate volume pedals going into a little Behringer table-top mixer.

This unsynced approach doesn't work so well if you want stuff that's really tightly orchestrated rhythmically, but I've just adapted the way I play to be less meter-dependent, which has been super-fun and very liberating.

If you want to play really tightly, use headphones as described in the first paragraph above, and start your piece with the drum box sending a midi clock to the EDP or other looper (DL4 excepted), then bring the drums up in the mix whenever you want to start hearing them.



dan

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