October 14 2024
Mon 14 October 2024
Bit of a shuffle in what musical projects I'm working on - two groups I'm with have fizzled (at least, my involvement with them has) and one other is coming up.
One of the bits I've signed up for is playing samples on stage through front-of-house, so I've invested in a Boss RC-5 loop station.
These have seen a resurgence recently, solo artists have been using them pretty extensively to build up tracks (Ed Sheeran put out his own). The basic gist is that you can record a few bars of music through them, then have them repeat and play over them.
One of the other things they do is play back samples - modern ones like the RC-5 have storage you can drop .wav files of a certain type on there. In the case of the RC-5, it specifically wants certain formats -- for folks beating their heads against this, the cheat sheet is:
sox existingfile.wav -e floating-point -b 32 -r 44.1k looperfile.wav
Another bothersome thing about the RC-5 at least is the amount of fiddling to get loops/samples playing the way you want - setting tempo, repeat, the sample name, and so on. Of course, my first instinct is that I'd like to be able to backup and restore everything. Thankfully, you can do this -- if you plug the pedal into USB and go to Setup->Storage, it'll appear as a USB device. The storage is built-in, so swapping SD cards isn't a thing. You can then use rsync to back up and restore.
For setting up your setting and completely avoiding inputting text using a scroll wheel, you'll need to edit the XML file (what year is this?) at //ROLAND/DATA on the device. A lot of the fields are self-explanatory, the main bother being the Loop name -- this is done as an XML element of the ASCII codes of each letter in the name, like so:
# "My Loop"
<NAME>
<C01>77</C01>
<C02>121</C02>
<C03>32</C03>
<C04>76</C04>
<C05>111</C05>
<C06>111</C06>
<C07>112</C07>
<C08>32</C08>
<C09>32</C09>
<C10>32</C10>
<C11>32</C11>
<C12>32</C12>
</NAME>
This is a bit bothersome, so I took the opportunity to learn some more golang -- check out https://github.com/gerrowadat/looperutil for a wee utility for editing XML files and pretty-printing your setup.
Golang's XML parser is one of those patterns I'm not sure if I love or hate - make some structs that look like the DOM of the XML file, and "magic" happens. Works for my purposes, though.
If you're nervous, then looperutil xmlname "My Loop" will spit out the above, and you can paste it into your editor like a farmer.
Overall, this solidifies Roland/Boss as being still probably the kings of pedals that don't fuck around -- not only have they always been built like tanks, the ways to interact with them (be it stepping on them, or XML) still seems solid since I bought my first OC-2 in...1995 or so?
Now, it only remains to actually get out and play some gigs. As the serially defunct blog author said, "more on that Later"...
