EDITING LOOPS i give it 100% very fast and easy to create loops and they sound perfect, love it.
PLAYING LOOPS at home i give it 90% its nice and mostly usable to tinker around with your fingers and your face glued to the screen, i dont mind it at all , quite usable and works well.
PLAYING LOOPS ON STAGE i give it 50% , this is actually where i need 100% as its most important to me after all the work i put in to it.
Why such a poor rating?
It does not deliver ease of use as it should be for all different reasons, the basics reasons are, you cant see all the loops you are dealing with especially if you are standing a bit further from the device, and if you are close enough to use the foot pedals the loops are varied in size on screen and some are way too small to see at a glance from a distance, so this makes foot pedal control very difficult, specially when you cant move back if you overshoot a selection. I found it to be safer to just move closer to the device and hit the loop i need except that does not work eather when you have very small loop sections on a long song, and to make things worse the chances of you dropping down the window you so desperately need are very great as the TAP TO CLOSE area is right above all the loops so by finger fiddling around your loops while playing will drop down the window at some point , its inevitable.
In just two live gigs i have found this to be a great problem.
So the issue is how do we get a better experience on stage and how should we use loops.
It does make a big difference on how you create loops on how you operate on stage, if you use small loops and hope to use them as return points you are screwed, bad thing to do for good on stage experience, i found by creating loops on all of my song works the best so no audio section is not looped, this works the best but still has the damn intro and ending thats too small to deal with, but at least you can use verses, choruses, solo sections which are normally pretty big , thats ok for 3 to 4 minute songs with standard music sections, i even create one loop for all songs that i dont need looping as it helps if you want to perfectly repeat a song this one is a great benefit of having looping.
So my feeling is Peter is going to have to pull a rabit out of the hat to fix this as its a major issue.
Which way do we go even buttons on all loops so we can see them all on stage at distance and use the song heading section as an overall song position indicator, which i personally think would work for me on stage a lot better, because i dont greatly rely on the waveform idea when performing, i am concentrating at the audience and require quick feedback of where i am withi a loop and which loop is next , i dont give a damn about a waveform i need to select next loop on the run so to me having all loops easily visible and labeled is crucial to me on stage, a quick glance on the overall song position in the song heading area is all i need to know where i am roughly in the song but the loop buttons give me a more accurate visual feedback to where i am in the loop and my ears and eyes are there to hear where i am in the song also plus the lyrics quide me as well so i have plenty of assurance to what i am doing.
At the moment i dont dare use the foot pedal to choose a loop as some of them are so small to see if im on the correct loop and i am too scared to move in case i go too far in the loop selection i have no time left to do it again and then i get caught with my pants down where the wrong loop starts playing, so the issue is a visual one where we need to see what we are doing with our loops, this is the most important thing to us on stage at a distance.
Without changing the whole interface i feel as though it could be improved, yes it will feel different to what it is now but i do believe for loop users it will be better on stage as all the loop buttons would stand out eavenly sized for ease of selection on stage and the quick visual feedback would be much more on stage user friendly so then we would be more at ease using the loop facility, at the moment i am not willing to risk chasing loops i cant see clearly and havent got full control to home in on a particullar loop.
The logic of operation of looping is now great , its really fantastic how we can do things on the run the issue is a visual one, we need big bright buttons representing our loops and bright clear selection feedback so we can feel at ease when choosing loops on stage at a distance , we need both direction manouvrability to not be afraid to start moving around the loops with little time to spare.
As you know most of the time you decide things last moment , we then need speed and ease of use to get to next loops otherwise we are just playing our song as usual.