I play acoustic guitar with a mic, and as much as I love loopers, they’re hard to use in a studio settings because most loopers are assuming an electric or amplified instrument on a stage, where footswitch noise wouldn’t be an issue.
If you were to try to loop using mics in a treated room however, that footswitch KA-CHUNK! is going to ruin recordings. Even with the best timing or use of crossfades at loop seams you’re still going to hear that transient.
Using a random drum machine for the BPM, can I trigger the Aeros in the middle of a measure to commence looping at the start of the next upcoming measure, then exit recording and immediately start playing back the part I just recorded at the end of that measure, all without having to re-touch the footswitch after the initial tap to kick off the recording?
The manual seems to imply this is possible, but then I read a comment that said this is not possible, hence my confusion.
I know loopers like the Octatrack have an option called Quantized Recording, where you can hit a button a few beats before the start of a new measure, at which point the Octatrack is armed and will wait to start recording at the beginning of the next measure. After recording for a specific numbers of beats (steps) it exits recording. This gives me time to hit the button, get my hands in position to play and avoid excess noise getting picked up.
If I could do this with the Aeros that’d be an instant buy for me. I’ve used a Pigtronix Infinity for a while now with the Soft Step 2, which can send MIDI to the Pigtronix and perform the aforementioned use case. (The Softstep 2 is also made of super quiet rubbery material, which lets me interact with it and not have that interaction picked up by the mic).
the stomp switches of the Aeros are significantly louder than soft switches on other stomp boxes which makes using it in combination with a microphone problematic. It has a very audible click sound which gets picked up in the microphone. I’m considering ordering soft switches and replacing the custom stomp switches. It may be also be something that can be solved with an additional midi controller.
Yeah. My sense is that even with custom soft switches any amount of noise is going to get picked up, making the only way to really do this is, as you said, with an external MIDI controller like the SoftStep 2.
I considered the Soft Step and other foot controllers, but finally settled on the Nektar Pacer for the solid build, 10 programmable buttons, and ease of programming with a web browser. I’m familiar with the foot switches on the Pacer, so I gravitated in that direction.
It looks like the Soft Step 2 is more versatile than the Nektar Pacer, with touch-sensitive buttons and incremental commands for knobs or faders. But I use Midi Designer Pro on my iPad for knobs, faders, etc…
Hey there, you can start the recording prior, yes, the Aeros will follow to the measure. However, there is still a needed playback/stop command to start playback/stop recording. The Aeros has been mapped with MIDI commands since version 3.1.10, read more about the latest firmware here
If you’re looking for some feedback as you assess prioritization: IMHO this is one of those features that is a godsend for people working with hardware synths or modular systems or musicians interested in doing more studio, as opposed to live, work.
It’s actually my favorite thing about the BlackBox1010, which is in some ways a competitor in my mind. I can sit there and create little synth loops or figure out a guitar part, and then simply hit a button on the BlackBox screen, at which point the BlackBox will wait for the next measure, grab a clean loop for me quantized to a specific number of bars that I set, and immediately start playing it back. Kind of a ‘set it and forget it approach’ which leaves me free to get situated with the guitar or be able to tweak synth parameters without having to worry about punching out.
You might also benefit from an “auto start” feature where the Aeros starts recording once you to start playing. Not aware that SS is planning to build this…
Combine that with a fixed number of measures (set track lengths) and you have something truly silent.