For the past three years or so I experimented with Ableton Live and used it a bit on my Claytronica work. I always liked Live but it never found its way into my main recording toolkit. When I recorded One Feather Shy I used Live on a couple of tracks on one song, Fire Dancing On Frozen Tundra. So when I upgraded Make Noise Studios over the last couple of months, I thought I'd leave Live on the sidelines.

I have been seriously stoked about the recent upgrade to Pro Tools LE 8 and the addition of POD Farm Platinum and SoundToys Native. I could get lost forever in the power that is at my fingertips. As stated in an earlier post, I am limited only by my imagination. I believed that the studio upgrade was complete.

I kept reading about SooperLooper, "... a live looping sampler capable of immediate loop recording, overdubbing, multiplying, reversing and more. It allows for multiple simultaneous multi-channel loops limited only by your computer's available memory.", as quoted from the website. The app is modeled after the much revered Echoplex Digital Pro Plus hardware looper. Although I've been very pleased with my Boss RC-50 Loop Station, I thought I should experience SooperLooper to understand the buzz. Earlier this week I downloaded the tool, which can run on a Mac as an AU plug-in or under Jack, an audio server originally written for Linux and later for OS X. Now, nothing against my Linux loving brethren, but I've never been fascinated by working at the atomic level of computing. I'd much rather use my computers to get stuff done than diddle with my computers. In my testing of SooperLooper and Jack, I was quite impressed with the power of the tools, but found the combination cumbersome, geeky to setup, and drawing my attention away from the music. I also lost the ability to use my plug-ins while looping, at least without find additional tools to do so. It occurred to me, however, that although Pro Tools doesn't support AU plug-ins, Ableton Live indeed does. So this evening I installed my copy of Live v6, fired up a session with SooperLooper as a plug-in, and lost my mind. So much so, I upgraded Live to the current version, v7.

So what's to be so excited about this SooperLooper of which I speak? Certainly I've only scratched the surface so far, but I can build and manipulate loops with unprecedented control on the Mac, with not only multiple loops running under SooperLooper, but also multiple instances of SooperLooper. Holy Moly! I ClayLoop'ed three sessions this evening with multiple loops running through multiple plug-ins. I can imagine an ultra-portable looping configuration, pretty much a guitar, laptop, mBox 2, and a control pedal or two - I could carry the whole mess into a performance hall in one go! More germane to the task at hand, I expect the combination of Live and SooperLooper to be a important element in the construction of Breathe, filling the role that the RC-50 played on One Feather Shy while expanding my looping capabilities and perhaps improving the overall fidelity of the loops or at least ensuring excellent fidelity with minimal hassle.

Now I think the Make Noise Studios upgrade is really complete! I am in the groove and playing a lot of music with the new setup, particularly fretless guitar, and the muse, she's here with me.