DIY 6 tracks player

[Cuki79]

Hi Everyone,

Here is my last DIY project. It's been a long time I've been looking for the best band-in-a-box solution for me. I have been through everything (Digitech Trio, Loopers, Beatbuddy...) But nothing worked really for me.

None of those enabled me to play without being obsessed by the next footswitch press.

If you are looping you need to be right on time and if you use a drum machine you have to press BEFORE the right time.

So I basically gave up until BOSS released the BOSS DR-01S. This was a revelation for me. The BOSS enables you to have two alternative drum/percussion flavour by muting/unmuting instruments.

This is GREAT because, if you push late: it does not mess up anything.

You can thus perform stress less

Since then, I've been trying many thing to EXPAND the BOSS DR-01s concept. I tried with Axoloti board, PC+Möbius looper (a.k.a. Ed Sheeran's Chewie II) and end up with a Raspberry Pi + The Reaper DAW.

Here is the 1st prototype:
You have 6 tracks of same lenght that loop all the time. The footswitches only mute/unmute them.

* You have 3 tracks with drum and bass. 3 footswitches control these tracks. If one is selected, the other are muted automatically.

* You have 3 tracks of lead guitar/Backing vocals/Keys...
3 footswitches control those tracks. Those are totally independant.

The two other footswitches are:
* Play/Stop (Stop returns to zero)
* Mode.

The mode footswitch changes the functionality of all the other footswitches.
* You can then individually choose any track and adjust its volume
* You can also browse the songs stored in the memory of the Raspberry Pi. (Only limited by the SD card size)

The touchscreen gives access to all of the Reaper DAW functionalities...

The whole thing works powered by a li-ion battery.



On the left of the Raspberry Pi (Screen) you see the audio interface. You can also use the Raspberry Pi bluetooth capibility to stream sound wirelessly...

The footswitches are connected to a USB keyboard I've ripped off and rewired.
The "mode" functionality is obtained by using one footswitch wired to the "NumLock" key.



Reaper is fully tunable. You can reprogram the Graphic User Interface to make it fit in a small 320x480 LCD screen.
Here each track features a volume pot, a mute toggle button and a pan pot. The pan pot can be used if you use stereo tracks. For example you can record your tracks so that the drums are on the "left" and the bass on the "right". Then the pan enables you to adjust the balance between both.



Note that making a 6-track looper similar to Singular sound Aeros studio looper would not be too complex (but It would require to use a proper low latency audio interface)

Next step: Make a proper enclosure.

[martingitdave]

Congrats! I know how hard you worked on this!

[Marty C]

Holy cow!!! That’s impressive! Great job!

[Chipotle]

Incredible job! I use and love Reaper partly because of its flexibility and customizability. The fact that you can do something like this with it makes me like it that much more.

[tadol]

Thats an extremely impressive project! I think this same kind of functionality can be done with Loopy on the iPad, but I like your interface and the foot buttons -

[Cuki79]

Finally got some time for that project



In the meantime, I developped a less powerfull version (based on microcontroller) that I will have to finish later on...

This one is a beast... since there is a singleboard computer inside. It takes long to boot but then it is powerfull.

1) top buttons:
left of the display: start/stop return to zero
right of the display: Menu (then all the buttons are for browsing songs, tuning volume of each track...)


The idea is to have a sequential and parallel workflow at the same time. Each songs are made of sequence of parallel loops. For example
sequence 1: count in
sequence 2: verse 1 : includes two loops playing in parallel (cajon and bass)
sequence 3: bridge 1: includes three loops playing in parallel (cajon and bass and backing vocals)
sequence 4: chorus: includes three loops playing in parallel (cajon and bass and lead guitar)
...

2) Middle buttons line: Meant to progress in the song. ex: At the next beat go to next sequence/go to previous sequence

3) lower buttons line: Mute/Unmute extra parallel tracks.

• The lower buttons enable the player not to be "Stucked" in a song structure.
• The middle buttons enable the player not to "tap dance". And get a pre-programmed combination of tracks with one "footswitch press"

[SpruceTop]

Cuki, in my opinion, you're a GENIUS! Thanks, as usual, for doing your thing!

[martingitdave]

Originally Posted by SpruceTop

Cuki, in my opinion, you're a GENIUS! Thanks, as usual, for doing your thing!

It’s not just your opinion. In the past few years I continue to be amazed at Cuki’s creativity and ingenuity. He’s also a very good person and friend.