Newbie Question: Replacing an X4 Looper and a Beat Buddy?

[Tappistry]

Hi all. Newbie question here. I’ve been digging through some past threads, and I’m not sure if the feature set of the latest version of C3 can do what I’m hoping it can … so please bear with the newbie musings.

My pedal setup is … perhaps a bit different than the average guitarist. I play a combination of Chapman Stick and guitar. Something I do with my conventional pedalboard setup is that I have a Beat Buddy and a Ditto X4 Looper. The X4 and the BB pedal both have MIDI clock sync features, so when I record a loop with my Chapman Stick, the Beat Buddy will play back the drum loop in time with the recorded audio loop and vice versa. One other thing that I can do with the accessory switch on my Beat Buddy is trigger cymbal accent hits at will.

It seems that C3 doesn’t have live audio loop control as of yet. I saw Brad’s suggestion of Mobius for that.

So with all of that in mind, and using C3 with something like a Soft Step 2 controller and EZDrummer: could I configure C3 to do what my X4/BB setup is doing on my regular pedalboard? I would love to be able to achieve all of this inside Cantabile, but I’m not sure if it’s capable of all of this yet?

Edit: answering my own question a bit … the looping function will definitely have to be handled with one of the programs in this thread:

Vst LoopeR Suggestions?

Hi, I am looking for a vst plugin that is a looper. Something that let’s me replay the input signal. There have been famous foot pedals for guitar like JamMan, EH Looper 22500, etc. I want something that’s clean and doesn’t change the signal. I want something that has long loop time. I GoogleD vst loopers, but it doesn’t look like there’s much out there to be honest, rather disappointing. Anybody in the live performance community know of a good vst looper? Thanks Vmusic

Now the remaining question is: utilizing this option that Brad posted:

Media player timing sync support

This is slowly coming together. I had to do a fairly large refactoring of the transport control mechanism, but that’s mostly in-place now - as is a new sync mode setting, a state behaviour for sync mode and most of the UI related bits. When a player is synced, it’s transport controls disappear when it’s stopped and fade out when playing or paused. Also, there’s a little link icon to indicate it’s synced and a new context menu popup to set the sync mode. [image] Basically the framework is i…

Will that achieve what I want to do with EZDrummer if I use it in conjunction with a VST audio looper?

Cheers!

[dave_dore]

Hi David,

If I’m following you correctly, the media player Master/Slave is not the connection you would use. Instead you could just have both vst’s (the looper and the drummer) synced the Host clock in cantabile and then you could adjust the tempo for both simultaneously from there as well as easily save the results with the song. The switches to turn this function on are in the vst itself under something like “host sync”.

Dave

[Tappistry]

@dave_dore

Hi David,

If I’m following you correctly, the media player Master/Slave is not the connection you would use. Instead you could just have both vst’s (the looper and the drummer) synced the Host clock in cantabile and then you could adjust the tempo for both simultaneously from there as well as easily save the results with the song. The switches to turn this function on are in the vst itself under something like “host sync”.

Dave

Ok, thanks! I will try this when I’m able. Currently buried in studies right now and procrastinating my workload for the end of this trimester. Haha!

Can the host clock in Cantabile be changed dynamically with an audio loop? So for instance, I record a loop at an arbitrary rhythm. Can the bpm of that loop change the tempo of the host clock, so then when I start the midi drum loop, it’s synced with that new speed?

[dave_dore]

Hey David,

As far as I know the main transport host clock is not slave-able except by external hardware MIDI clock or possibly a MIDI loopback Out of Cantabile and back in using something like loop-b. The media players are slave-able but are not suited to looping task you want to do. The point I can make is this, if the master host clock is driving both the looper and the drummer then the sync on bpm is already there so you would set your arbitrary rythym speed inside Cantabile and it would in turn drive clock for both the looper and the drummer. Or you could set the ez-drummer to the desired speed using Cantabile’s Host Tempo and your looper would already be clocked to it.

Dave

[Tappistry]

@dave_dore

Hey David,

As far as I know the main transport host clock is not slave-able except by external hardware MIDI clock or possibly a MIDI loopback Out of Cantabile and back in using something like loop-b. The media players are slave-able but are not suited to looping task you want to do. The point I can make is this, if the master host clock is driving both the looper and the drummer then the sync on bpm is already there so you would set your arbitrary rythym speed inside Cantabile and it would in turn drive clock for both the looper and the drummer. Or you could set the ez-drummer to the desired speed using Cantabile’s Host Tempo and you looper would already be clocked to it.

Dave

Dave,

This is amazingly helpful. Thank you! Since I’m coming from a pedal-oriented thought process, I’m probably bringing a more limited/amateur concept for what I want to achieve. It sounds like Cantabile (combined with some sort of looping VST) will be able to achieve exactly what I want to do.

-From yet another Dave, we are slowly taking over the world.