A fellow emailed me asking about my thoughts on the new boutique hardware looper on the scene, and this is what I wrote back:
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I have mixed feelings about the Looperlative. I do think it’s really
cool that somebody is answering what a lot of people have been asking
for for a long time: a stereo, high-resolution long delay. Certainly,
there’s more to it than that – the idea of multiple sync’d or unsync’d
stereo loops in a single box seems like the biggest “wow” factor
involved. But it strikes me as a sort of “modern retro” version of a
looper – modern technical specs being dedicated to a souped-up version
of the sort of long-delay paradigm that’s been so prevalent in looping
for decades.
Reservations/questions/concerns I have?
– The much-ballyhooed “easily updatable software via Ethernet” feature
seems like a very similar basic concept to the Electrix CFC card update
paradigm, so I’m not sure I understand how this is such an innovative
angle from what the Repeater had nearly half a decade ago. Bob seems a
lot more together than Electrix (granted, that’s not saying a whole
lot).
– As far as I can tell, Bob has basically had two musicians working with
the unit for about a month, and is now preparing to ship version 1.x
units. Without wanting to take anything away from Steve Lawson or Rick
Walker (or Bob), I have a suspicion that, as more and more players use
the unit in different ways, under different circumstances, that more and
more bugs will start showing up which simply didn’t reveal themselves
from what Steve or Rick do. I could be totally wrong, and that the
three of those guys have come up with a totally, 100% bug-free software
version. But based on my experiences in beta-testing two different
software upgrades for the Echoplex, I have a hard time thinking that
there won’t be at least a few bugs needing to be ironed out.
– Maybe the single biggest thing, for me: I don’t get a strong sense
that there’s a serious overriding, consistent design angle involved. I
get the sense that Bob had some ideas for what he wanted to see
implemented, solicited some more ideas from a couple of his favorite
musicians, and put them into a box. As time goes on, it looks like
he’ll continue to solicit more ideas and add them as he has the time and inclination.
The idea of a “design philosophy” has much more to do with the world of
instrument design than effects design, I think – one of the biggest
aspects of the Echoplex is the way that all of the functions and
parameters are based on a few basic, fundamental design aspects, which
are followed through in numerous different applications. I don’t see so
much of that with the Looperlative – maybe because it’s coming from more
of an effects-based paradigm, or… maybe because there’s no feature
list or spec sheet available?!
In any event, all of this – not just my talk, but the ideas of anyone
other than Bob, Steve, and Rick – is completely hypothetical speculation
until such time and the unit actually starts shipping and being used by
a fair number of players. I definitely don’t see it replacing or
supplanting an Echoplex, and it’s been gratifying to see that there’s
been relatively little trash-talking involved – Steve’s website comment
about the LP-1 “kicking the ass of every other hardware looper out
there” is about the worst I’ve seen, and I’ll grant him a bit of
spur-of-the-moment-excitement chest-beating for the time being.