I am missing something with the looper?

[bryanm]

Can someone help me understand the interface of the looper? Why are there four buttons four each track when its pretty much industry standard that all of those functions can be handled by one? Press the button to record, again to toggle between record and play as much as you want, hold to undo and double tap to stop, and then press and hold to clear. Simple.

What they have is something that you have to put down your instrument and use a mouse to manipulate? and I am completely baffled as to why that would be designed into the interface buttons as four separate functions?

[Abikis]

You're not missing anything, external control of the looper is still extremely limited.

Unless, according to the manual, you have the stompio which supposedly has the switches function as expected.

Switches 1 and 2 (individual tracks)
• Tap once: RECORD/OVERDUB/PLAY on the corresponding track.
• Double tapping: stop any playback or overdubbing on that track.
• Press & hold: erase the corresponding loop.
• Led modes:
• Off: the track is off.
• Green: tracks have content, but are stopped.
• Blinking red: the track is recording or overdubbing.
• Blinking green: the track is playing back.
Switch 3 (metronome track)
• Press & hold: activate/deactivate the looper metronome.
• Tap: when the metronome is ON you can tap tempo on this switch. Tapping tempo is only available when
no recording, overdubbing or playback is occurring.
• Led modes:
• Off: the metronome is disabled.
• Green: metronome is on.
Switch 4 (global track)
• Tap: START/ STOP for all the tracks. This is only available if there is something recorded in the tracks.
• Press & Hold: access the clear mode. To clear any of the tracks, do as follows:
1. Press & hold down the fourth switch.
2. Tap the tracks to clear all the layers recorded on the corresponding track.
3. Tap again the fourth switch to exit the clear mode

So the functionality exists, it's just not user programable.

Looking at the stompio manual, the single/double/hold presses send different cc#, so in theory all the secondary functions are midi controllable and assigned to specific cc#, but there is no way to reassign them.

[bryanm]

Thanks, I will take a look at that since I have a soft step I can manually program different cc values to tap hold and double tap.

[rsommerv]

It seems the AT4 looper is very different from a physical looper, I had a conversation with a friend who was more familiar with physical pedals and we were talking totally different terminology, in the AT4 looper it's effectively 4 overdubs except you can start and stop each independently. The AT5 looper is closer to a physical pedal where you just hit the stomp to keep adding overdubs.

I was doing things on AT4 that I can't seem to do on AT5, e.g. I recorded loop1 as the bass part for the chorus and loop2 as the bass for the verse then played lead over the loops starting and stopping the relevant parts but in AT5 all the loops (overdubs) play at the same time.

Note this is using an external midi unit to control the looper, not a mouse.