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Old 02-09-2019, 03:00 PM   #3
foca
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Argentina
Posts: 21
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Exactly, as Mehmethan says, you can automate the looper of your choice. I've been doing this for a while before Alk came out, and now Alk makes it much simpler, but I would LOVE to have this "record" and "playback" items natively in Reaper, being that as a DAW Reaper is much more powerful.

One nice tip, to get a better visual reference of your arrangement (sorry for the long post):

Instead of using automation, you can control the looper via midi notes. So what you do is:

----- Look at the attached images, and maybe you can skip this description -----

- Create a "playback item", "rec item", "stop item", etc. (midi items)
- Inside each midi you set a note trigger, as short as possible, that will trigger the desired action in the looper.
- Configure the looper with the corresponding midi notes mapping.
- Give each item a specific color
- Make sure these midi items have "loop source" set to off in their properties, so you can make them longer or shorter as you may need and the action will be triggered only once (this will be clear when looking at the attached images).

Now you have your midi items ready to control the looper, and you can copy paste them throughout your track.

------- But don't skip this part -------

Important note for Super 8:

When developing this workflow I came across with the issue that many loopers (most of them) don't go from recording to stop without passing though playback. So if I wanted to record a loop, then stop it and play it back later, this wasn't possible. Super 8 is an example of this, but there's a way to make it work:

In Super 8 first box for example: midi note 36 triggers rec, and midi note 37 triggers first play and then stop.

So I created 2 different "stop items": one for "stop rec" and one for "stop play". The "stop rec" item triggers note 37 twice really quick (so it actually does “play” and immediately “stop”), and the "stop play" item triggers it just once.

One last thing you may consider is having one track with the looper itself, and another track to control it, so you can leave the looper track working as an audio track.

One important issue here is that when you go through the rec item again, maybe by mistake, your last recording will be deleted. Maybe you could make a command that mutes the “rec” and “stop rec” item that has just recorded something, and trigger this with an action marker. I’m thinking out loud, but I’m sure there’s a workaround for this. Maybe have a track for recording and a track for playback, and then you just have. a button in your toolbar that mutes all items in the rec tracks, this is much simpler. And you could even have another track with playback items in the same spots as the rec items, and you activate this track for a “playback mode”….

Obviously Alk’s workflow is much simpler and gives you more space for creativity.

Hope this helps, and hope someone can create actual rec and playback items!! Pleaaaaseee!!
Attached Images
File Type: png Looper visual reference_small.png (61.2 KB, 597 views)
File Type: png Rec item.png (61.7 KB, 606 views)
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