Jamie TehFor a school project, my son wants to do a live looping performance involving keyboard, vocals and maybe violin. Looping pedals that support vocals and another instrument are surprisingly expensive; several hundred dollars at least. So, I looked into software options and couldn't find anything that quite did what I want.
He wants to be able to quickly toggle overdubbing of loops. He also wants to be able to mute parts of the loop - e.g. mute a set of instruments and bring them back later - which means the looper has to be multi-track.
REAPER's Super8 almost does the trick, but aside from its inaccessibility (my son has sight, so that's okay for him), it doesn't seem to work the way we want with MIDI control. When you assign record and play to MIDI CCs, it works the first time you trigger it, but not after that, which is weird.
GLoop is quite nice, but although it supports undo and redo for overdubs, it doesn't support multiple tracks that you can take out and bring back in at will.
I even looked at Ableton Live's Looper device, but that is only single track.
In the end, I gave up and wrote my own audio-only looper from scratch in #REAPER JSFX. It's very basic. It has a single stereo input and a single stereo output. It doesn't pass through input, so you put it on a track and send other tracks to it that you want included in the loop. It supports 4 stereo internal loop tracks and has separate record and play/stop triggers for each track, plus a reset trigger (9 triggers in total). The triggers are exposed as FX parameters which trigger when the value changes to 1, so you can map them to MIDI buttons or pedals using REAPER's parameter learn function.
I have them mapped to the 8 buttons on my Komplete Kontrol keyboard in MIDI mode. Kontrol MIDI templates allow you to expose multiple pages of buttons, so the reset trigger is mapped to the first button on the second page. If you're doing this with Kontrol, you'll want to change the buttons to gate instead of toggle, as otherwise, the buttons send on for the first press, off for the second press, etc.
I probably won't do much more with this - it serves its purpose - but I thought I'd post it here in case anyone might find it useful.
You can download it from here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jcsteh/jtReaper/main/jsfx/simplooper
He wants to be able to quickly toggle overdubbing of loops. He also wants to be able to mute parts of the loop - e.g. mute a set of instruments and bring them back later - which means the looper has to be multi-track.
REAPER's Super8 almost does the trick, but aside from its inaccessibility (my son has sight, so that's okay for him), it doesn't seem to work the way we want with MIDI control. When you assign record and play to MIDI CCs, it works the first time you trigger it, but not after that, which is weird.
GLoop is quite nice, but although it supports undo and redo for overdubs, it doesn't support multiple tracks that you can take out and bring back in at will.
I even looked at Ableton Live's Looper device, but that is only single track.
In the end, I gave up and wrote my own audio-only looper from scratch in #REAPER JSFX. It's very basic. It has a single stereo input and a single stereo output. It doesn't pass through input, so you put it on a track and send other tracks to it that you want included in the loop. It supports 4 stereo internal loop tracks and has separate record and play/stop triggers for each track, plus a reset trigger (9 triggers in total). The triggers are exposed as FX parameters which trigger when the value changes to 1, so you can map them to MIDI buttons or pedals using REAPER's parameter learn function.
I have them mapped to the 8 buttons on my Komplete Kontrol keyboard in MIDI mode. Kontrol MIDI templates allow you to expose multiple pages of buttons, so the reset trigger is mapped to the first button on the second page. If you're doing this with Kontrol, you'll want to change the buttons to gate instead of toggle, as otherwise, the buttons send on for the first press, off for the second press, etc.
I probably won't do much more with this - it serves its purpose - but I thought I'd post it here in case anyone might find it useful.
You can download it from here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jcsteh/jtReaper/main/jsfx/simplooper
kauer