Video(s): MSuperLooper + MIDI Guitar + glitch plugins = a lot of fun!

[BennyG]

Hey folks. Here's another demo video I made recently of a quick jam using MSuperLooper at the centre of a sort of live-looping / glitchy remix type setup:



The other star of this setup is the Jamstik Studio MIDI guitar, which I've recently acquired. It can output MIDI data pretty reliably (certainly more so than any other 'guitar to MIDI' solution I've tried), which means it's possible to play beats by tapping out notes on the fretboard. So much fun

I'm close to making MSL my main looper and the centre of my entire setup, but still bumping into the occasional limitation here and there, plus the odd suspected bugs and/or unexpected behaviours, but I'll save those comments for another thread.

Interested to see what other folks have been getting up to with MSuperLooper. If anyone can post or link me to other videos out there, I'd love to see some stuff!

[BennyG]

So I made another one of these videos. This time laying down some guitar first and the drums afterwards. It's a really fun little setup:



I'd like to expand on this by muting tracks, and also by using the different loops on each track for a bit more variety, but there's a few things I can't work out how to do - not sure if user error, or if the commands don't (yet) exist in MSL. I'm using MSL 14.16 in these videos, but I've now installed 15.00m and here's where I'm stuck:

Toggling Play/Mute
So I understand that I can bind any MIDI note to "Track x > Play" and then that note will toggle the play/mute on the desired track, but is there a way to toggle play/mute on whatever track is currently selected? I've tried binding a MIDI note to the Global Play parameter, but it doesn't actually seem to do anything. What am I doing wrong here?

Next/Previous loop within track
I think this one is definitely a FR. As things stand in 15.00m...

• I can bind a MIDI note to select any desired track
• I can bind a MIDI note to select the next/previous track
• I can bind a MIDI note to select any loop [1-4] within any desired track
• I can bind a MIDI note to select any loop [1-4] on all tracks simultaneously (a nice update btw )
• I can't bind a MIDI note to select the next/previous loop on a selected track
• I can't bind a MIDI note to select the next/previous loop on all tracks

I'm pretty sure the above is true (I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong!) - it would be very useful to be able to select the next/previous loop on whatever track is currently selected though, as I find myself quickly running out of buttons on my SoftStep controller at the moment. Next/previous loop on all tracks would also be useful I'm sure, although I don't currently have a need for that one myself.

[ericzang]

Looks like this will help in the next version:

15.00i changes:
Improved MSuperLooper workflow by adding access to all loops in each track. Added hidden parameters to toggle play, reverse, immediate clear, and switch between loops of selected track.

[BennyG]

Thanks for the reply Eric. I was pretty excited when I saw that entry in the change list, but I've tried the latest version (up to 15.00m now) and I still don't think what I need is quite possible. You can select "track x > loop y" with a single command, but you can't traverse back-and-forth between loops on a track in the same way as you can select next/previous track. Hopefully that will come in a future update, as I can't imagine it's a huge FR

[ericzang]

Ah, sorry, I missed your comment that you already tried the v15 beta (I haven't loaded it yet). I don't know if it is out of your current scope, but in context of my experience, I would first route the softstep messages to a scripting type program (Lemur, MAXMSP, Bome, or perhaps even Clyphx Pro for Ableton if that applies, etc), then pass the processed messages on to MSL.

My thought for this example would be to assign a CC to the loop parameter. Then a script, in receipt of the softstep message, could cycle through the 4 appropriate CC values that change the loop. Perhaps there is a midi plugin that could do something similar, such as a kind of step sequencer that only advances to the next value upon receipt of a midi command. I recall doing something similar with a Reaper JS a long time ago. I haven't found a way to do this with a melda multiparameter yet.

[BennyG]

Looks like this will help in the next version:

15.00i changes:
Improved MSuperLooper workflow by adding access to all loops in each track. Added hidden parameters to toggle play, reverse, immediate clear, and switch between loops of selected track.

Ah, ignore me, I was being blind! Found them...



Would have been easier to find if that was "Selected track" rather than "Select track" in the left-hand column, mind

Thanks for your helpful advice as always Eric, and thanks to Vojtech for adding these parameters