After my post My Favorite Free Music And Sound Software, I received several inquiries about tutorials for the software program SooperLooper. Since I am not aware of any tutorials other than the documentation on the SooperLooper website, I prepared this video screencast on Getting Started With SooperLooper. I have included a transcript from the video below (the video does move pretty quick)
Let me know if you find it helpful, and other topics on SooperLooper you would like to see covered.
Getting Started With SooperLooper from Joseph Fosco on Vimeo.
Transcript of the video Tutorial Getting Started With SooperLooper
This video is about Getting Started with SooperLooper
SooperLooper is an open source audio looping program you can download for free.
It is available for the Mac and Linux, I will be working here with the Mac version.
In this video, I’ll be covering three things
First we will look at launching SooperLooper and assigning Inputs and Outputs.
Next we will look at recording and playing loops
And finally we will take a quick look at syncing multiple loops
First you need to download and install 2 programs, SooperLooper, and another program called Jack. Jack is used to route audio to and from SooperLooper. Instructions for obtaining Jack are on the Sooper Looper website.
To get started, first you launch Jack. Once Jack is running, launch SooperLooper.
SooperLooper starts up with one player. You can add additional players, and we are going to do that. All you need to do is go to the session menu and add the type of player you’d like. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to add a mono loop.
Now I’ll start Jack running and then assign audio routing by clicking on the “Routing” button. This will open the Connection Manager, which shows all audio inputs and outputs. Clicking on the small triangle reveals each set of audio ports.
The system group refers to the audio interface, and SooperLooper has its own group. In the SooperLooper group, there is a common output, which is a mix of the audio from each player in SooperLooper, and then also individual outputs for each player. You can see the first player is a styeroeo player with 2 outputs, and the second player, which I added, is a mono player with 1 output. The same setup is reflected on the input side. SooperLooper’s common inputs route all audio input to all players, and each player also has individual inputs.
I am going to use the common inputs and outputs. To connect the audio interface input to Sooper Looper, I click on the first input from the audio interface, and then double click on the SooperLooper input. Then I do the same thing for input 2.
Next I do the same thing for the outputs. I click on the mixed output 1 of SooperLooper, and then double click on the audio interface output 1. And the same thing with output 2. Now audio coming into the computer through the audio interface is sent to SooperLoooper, and audio that SooperLooper is playing is sent out through the audio interface.
Next I am going to go to Sooper Looper and raise the recording threshold. This is so that Sooper Looper will not start recording as soon as I press the record button. Instead, SooperLooper will wait to record until the input audio level crosses the threshold I set. I’ll set this fairly low so that we really will not notice this slight delay. -49 db is plenty high for this.
Now, when I click on record SooperLooper will wait for me to play the first note. I am going to use the mouse, but if we had MIDI pedals it would be much easier. The mouse requires you use your hand to start and stop recording – which is not so convenient when you’re playing an instrument. But, the mouse will work for this demonstration.
To record the first loop. I click on record, and as you can see it’s waiting – It’s waiting for me to hit the first note. As soon as I hit it, it will start recording. So here we go…
I click record again to stop recording, and SooperLooper is playing the first loop. I can now play something over this loop. I can overdub on top of it.
When I click on Overdub, recording starts immediately, and when I click Overdub again recording stops. Overdub does not wait for the input audio to cross the threshold we set earlier. Overdub starts recording right away .
Now both loops are playing. Just so you know, you can always undo the last recording you did by clicking on undo. When I click Undo, the last loop will be erased. There, it’s gone. I’m going to rerecord it real quick.
I can now record another loop on the second player. This second player is independent of the first. The loop can be a different length. I can eventually change the volume of each player independently. I could also apply SooperLooper’s effects separately to each player .
So now I’ll record a second loop…
I hit record, and it is waiting to start…
OK, now this second Lopp is actually a little more than twice as long as the first. So the two loops are not playing completely in sync. As the loops play over and over, they get further and further out of sync.
To sync these loops, I can go up to quantize and click on it till it is set to “Loop”. Currently, SooperLooper is set to sync to Loop 1. Now in player 2 I check on “play sync” and SooperLooper will always start the 2 loops together.
And there the two loops are brought into sync.
Syncing will not do any type of time stretching, it will just start the loops together. If the second loop was too short, say by 1 second, syncing would create a double attack of the second loop. the second loop would start before the first, then when the first loop started 1 second later, SooperLooper would start the second loop again.
Well, that’s basically it – A Quick introduction to Getting Started With SooperLooper. If you have any questions or would like any further information, feel free to get in touch with me through my website at www.josephfosco.com. I’d be happy to help you out. Have fun!
