SooperLooper Forum

Hi there everybody,

I am new here and would appreciate it if you would hear my story and perhaps answer a question or two for me!

I am very new to the guitar having only started learning around 5 months ago. My guitar tutor told me that recording chord progressions and then improvising over them would be a great idea for my development as a player. After playing around with garageband and laying down a track of chord progressions, then stopping the track, rewinding the song creating a new track for the improv, recording that, screwing it up doing it again and again ad infinitum gets rather tedious. Especially using a keyboard and mouse to have to control garageband all the time. Not to mention the fact that I keep screwing up my chord progressions if I record for any longer than a few bars!!

I thought a loop station pedal may be the answer. Looking at the prices here in Australia, that will have to wait (a long time). Then I thought there must be a computer program that does the same thing and after digging around on the web I arrived here at the SooperLooper website and I thought my dreams had come true!

I rushed home from work last night, downloaded and installed SooperLooper on my Macbook, and I have to say that I found it rather tricky to get up and running. I am in my early thirties and consider myself fairly computer savvy, especially having completed a computer science degree and a related masters!! So after battling away with Jack, MIDI patchbay and SooperLooper for almost 2 hours I finally got it working. I shudder to think how the average dude with no interest/ability in computers would be able to get SooperLooper up and running. I think writing an absolute dummies guide with screenshots would be of great help to those people (and certainly me too!). Perhaps it is easier for sound engineers who are used to patching and binding things as you know what needs to be done first. It was just trial and error for me, trying to employ some common sense and scouring the forums. I think something fell into place for me after reading this post http://www.essej.net/slforum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=90 and shortly after reading this I had it up and running and was able to record my acoustic guitar thru the internal mic.

I have a Novation Xiosynth (mini 25 key midi controller/synth) that I finally managed to set up to enable me to use my toe on one of the high piano keys to start recording my guitar. I would have loved to have been able to record some syth sounds into SooperLooper, but that seemed a bit beyond me to sort out on the first night of using the program. Besides, I didn't want to break the working set-up that I had spent so much time getting working.

QUESTION 1 (for those that don't want to read the incredible amount of rubbish I have writen so far!)

Is there any easy way to assign the synth to a track and have that work alongside the internal mic that receives the guitar sound? My keyboard plugs in thru USB and in garageband if I create an instrument track it recognises the phat sounds coming thru the synth (rather that just the midi messages!) and can record it as I hear it from the amp!

QUESTION 2 (for those brave souls that have got this far!)

I am going to play with the software again tonight, to try to get the hand of recording seamless loops (only one version of the chord progression that I played sounded close to looping without a cut, a pop, or bit of silence messing things up for me). I am afraid to say that this was luck more than good timing. With regard to creating a seamless loop, are there any settings that can help me out?
Perhaps I was niave, but I assumed these quantizing loop machines (like the boss rc-2, jamman etc etc) used algorithms to help you get a nice seamless loop, by trimming extra silence or timeshifting slightly so that the loop fits together and repeats nicely!? Is it really just a question of hitting record and stop at PRECISELY the right time? If so does this come with practise? How long did it take you guys reading this to learn this skill? Or are there indeed some settings I can change in SooperLooper to give me a helping hand when creating chord progression loops!?

Perhaps if I have time and after I have used the software for longer I can provide a basic guide using laymans terms on how to get this excellent free software up and running with minimal pain and suffering so that artists can just strum/play away without worrying about the nitty gritty details!!

Many thanks for any replies or input in advance.

P.S. Are there any USB footswitch controllers available to control SooperLooper or is configuring a midi footswitch the only way to go!?

P.P.S Thanks for providing this excellent software kind sir!

I have to admit that the standalone version of SL on macs does require a lot of fiddling with external connection programs to get it going.

I think many people end up using the AudioUnit version with a host that manages and saves all of that for them. GarageBand, although nice, does not have the routing capabilities to be such a host, however. You might consider trying AULab as a host, it is included if you install Apple's development package (on the OS X media), but I can provide you with a separate copy too. Check out the forum posts about it here: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4 . I will try to provide more detailed info about setting up a session using it, maybe even posting some actual AULab saved sessions as templates.

Question 1: I'm not sure exactly what your synth is showing up as, or if it using your synth's USB as an audio interface as well as midi. If so, in the standalone SL you would have to configure an aggregate device in your system that included all of your inputs and outputs (including the USB audio as an input, alongside the builtin audio). Then use that device when you start JACK. You should see as many ports to connect as channels in your aggregate device. Then you have the option of connecting those inputs into Sooperlooper's main ins (so all loop instances can record them) or you can create custom loop instance in SL that have discrete I/O, and only connect your mic input to loop 1, and your synth to loop 2, for instance.
OR, go with the AU approach and do a similar thing with the sidechain capabilities of AULab. There all altogether too many options.

Question 2:
SL does carefully crossfade loop recording boundaries, so I don't expect that you'd be having obvious clicks or pops normally. As far as timing goes, if you aren't quantizing to anything then yeah, it does take some practice to record a loop that sounds even, rhythmically. But I would be curious to hear some examples of the clicks you are hearing... if possible record a snippet and send me an audio file. Also, you can post/send a SL session file to me of a session that is giving you troubles.

I haven't looked into the market for alternative foot controllers (eg USB)... but if they exists there is probably some tool out there to convert their output to midi that you can route in your computer.

Hi there,

Thanks for your quick and thorough response! I would indeed be grateful if you could email me AU Lab. I may indeed be blind but I couldn't find it on either the 10.4.8 Tiger Disk I have or the Leopard install disk! I did install something called core audio SDK, thinking that it may be a package within that toolset but alas not that I could find evidence of anything new after installing that!

The clicks and pops I am talking about are ambient noise that gets recorded after a mis-timed record stop operation, not a glitch per-say, rather a dreadful lack of timing!!

I was wondering if a USB foot switch would work if you bound it's input to a keystroke rather than a midi signal? These seem rather easy to make (could be cheaper than a looping peda to buy too).

As I am just learning and messing around at the moment, I am still contemplating getting a boss rc-2 for ease of use and hassle free set-up. Should I perhaps hold off on that purchase and bear with sooperlooper (and software in general, rather than hardware pedals etc).

Have any long time users out there got a hardware pedal that they never use because their software set up is easy, quick and intuitive to use and offers far more flexibility than the pedal alone. Just curious as to whether if I buy a pedal, I'll grow out of it quickly and come back to the software route, like I say I'm doing nothing fancy right now, just using it as a learning tool!

Thanks very much once again,

Have any long time users out there got a hardware pedal that they never use because their software set up is easy, quick and intuitive to use

Yes. I used a Boss RC-20 for years and then a Digitech JamMan. I'm now using SooperLooper exclusively because the sound is cleaner and it has more flexibility