Playing pre-recorded clips onstage.

[JimRayden]

Objective: Having pre-recorded or generated sound clips (up to several seconds) saved on a memory and a possibility to trigger them with a footswitch (several actually).

I was thinking of using a few of those voice rec/play module kit thingies. Then I started looking into recorder chips and discovered ISD4002 which records two minutes of sound at 8kHz sampling rate. I know it's not a whole lotta high end but that's as high as I could find.

Any other suggestions, perhaps pointers to higher quality chips or even ways to make use of digital everyday audio devices.

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Jimbo

[JimRayden]

Just to clarify, I don't need to be able to record it onstage, looper is not what I'm after. Just seeking for a way to have a prepared soundbox at my feet for nice special FX and such.

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Jimbo

[runmikeyrun]

mellotron 

seriously, use the search, there's some circuits out there people made out of RS items and toys.  Otherwise, you're looking at a boss sampler or something you can record something and call it up with a touch of a button.  Expensive but effective.

If you have an ipod and just need to play it once you can rig up an adaptor and plug it into the PA.  Before Ipods I used a tape deck and i got 5 minute blank cassettes.  They would play the song's intro or something in the middle and the tape would just play silence after it and stop.  Man that seems like such ancient technology but i guess that WAS way back in 2001!

[Rodgre]

Before my band switched to our current backing track scenario, I used to use a Boss DR. Sample box (SP-303 to be precise)

with all of our loops, samples, backing tracks, etc, and I would trigger them with a Behringer FCB1010,

hitting different switches triggered different samples. I went through a lot of branstorming to find rigs that would work for my uses throughout the years, starting way back in the day by manually playing a guitar riff into my old Korg SDD-2000 sampling delay to trigger for the next song in the set, moving on to an archaic Akai S-612 sampler with impossible to find Quick Disks and a custom-built MIDI footswitch, to the Dr. Sample, to now, where we just use a racked-up CD Player and a mixer/headphone amp. We send the track on the left channel of the CD  to the FOH PA, and the right side has the click, which goes to our drummer's earbuds.

Roger

[Seljer]

a midi footswitch + a laptop with audio interface would probably be among the more powerful solutions....of course, thats if you allready have a laptop to use

[JimRayden]

a midi footswitch + a laptop with audio interface would probably be among the more powerful solutions....of course, thats if you allready have a laptop to use

Yeah I was just got referred to MIDI controlling. The Behringer 1010 and a laptop. Can anyone describe how these two would be communicating and how to assign functions and sound clips to certain footswitches. What software, etc.

I'm a complete dummy when it comes to MIDI. All I can do with it is make happy tunes in certain programs.

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Jimbo

[Seljer]

you can get a simple MIDI->USB interface for about $40
for around $170 you can get various USB audio interfaces that'll give you 1 or 2 regular audio inputs/outputs as well as MIDI inputs/outputs

no idea about the software side but I'm pretty sure you can do it in Sonar/Cubase, somehow map the MIDI commands to samples or something.....

[JimRayden]

Ah, so it won't be too different from programming MIDI-sampled drum tracks?

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Jimbo

[JimRayden]

Before my band switched to our current backing track scenario, I used to use a Boss DR. Sample box (SP-303 to be precise)

As an amazing coincidence, one of these just popped up for sale at a local forum a few days ago and I just grabbed it. There aren't too many sampler machines floating around here, that was pure luck.

I've had lots of fun playing around with it. It's a very very very fun toy, especially the effects department. Now I'll have to find a MIDI-footswitch...

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Jimbo