In my fairly obsessive quest to achieve quantise replace using ableton, I’ve tried to persuade the built-in looper to drop record in/out based on a dummy clip, that’s a goner. I’ve had a look at Mobius, which is a supremely powerful looper, but the one thing preventing me from going any further is the screen glitches I get when running it, parts of the display remain when I switch tracks and it’s just too annoying to live with.

So, I’ve come back to Echoloop, the VST equivalent of the Echoplex Digital Pro, both created by Matthias Grob. Last time I had a number of niggling issues getting in the way, but somehow (windows 10?) it has just started working exactly as I hoped it would. I’m now investigating the various QR parameters and looking as ever to videos my main QR-inspirer, Bill Walker to see what’s possible. Here’s some of his work collected together. Check him out (buy his CD!) and you’ll quickly hear how his rhythmical patterns lift his work out of the realm of frippertronics and the morass of swampy reverbs that many loopers seem satisfied with.

One reason for success has been to follow Andy Butler’s guide rather more closely than before (RTFM!) and to have the FCB1010 send mid notes on a different channel to the CC messages, with the mid input channel only passing on data on that midi channel. Previously, I had spurious CC commands triggering parts of Echoloop, doh…

Once I’m more familiar with it, this is likely to feature in my live set, along with a lovely octave shimmer reverb I’ve created using Ableton’s grain delay. Patience, waiting world 😉