TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- DJ Booth
-- Question for EFX1000 owners

Question for EFX1000 owners

how long of a sample can you record with one of these bad boys?

8 bar loop.

ok excuse this very basic question, but its been over a decade since ive looked at sheet music. a bar is a measure. so on a 4/4 count house or trance track, a bar is 4 beats right?

also it seems strange that the 1000 maxes out by bars instead of actual time. i mean, 8 bars could be any length of time and im sure the processor has a limited amount of (probably solid state) memory.

i am not posting anything relevant to this topic...


but i like your sig ! Sander Kicks Ass

quote:

Originally posted by MikeyN i am not posting anything relevant to this topic... but i like your sig ! Sander Kicks Ass

haha, thanks man. sander is by far my favorite house DJ. and yours is pretty tight as well. did you do the photoshop on that yourself?

quote:

Originally posted by Vero ok excuse this very basic question, but its been over a decade since ive looked at sheet music. a bar is a measure. so on a 4/4 count house or trance track, a bar is 4 beats right? also it seems strange that the 1000 maxes out by bars instead of actual time. i mean, 8 bars could be any length of time and im sure the processor has a limited amount of (probably solid state) memory.

You're right, I think he meant to say "8 beat"

If you're doing a Feedback loop with the Echo time set to 8/1, then you'll have a 8 beat (2 bar) loop.

However, there is a trick to double this: hold down TAP, and press the 4/1 button. This will half your BPM count, allowing you to get a 16 beat (4 bar) loop by setting it back to 8/1.

So to answer your question, the longest loop you can have is 16 beats.

ok, but i still dont get why it records in beats instead of real time.

Because the loop is "beat synced" to the tempo. So you can create the loop, and run it in sync with your playing track.

quote:

Originally posted by Vero ok, but i still dont get why it records in beats instead of real time.

ok, i guess im just not making my question clear. any recording device must have a recording medium. tapes, cd, md, dat, flash memory, etc... in this case, we have a sampler with a built in digital memory of some unknown size.

so if im playing a track at 60 bpm, an 8 count sample will be 8 seconds long. if im playing it at 120 bpm, my sample is 4 seconds long. ok so hypathetically if im playing at 1 bpm, my sample is now 8 minutes long.

the efx 1000 must have a limited amount of memory to record on. so either it varies the recording quality based on the bpm of the source, or it has a time limit.

what im really trying to figure out, is if i buy one, and crack it open, can i increase the onboard memory to acieve longer sampling time? i cant imagine anyone has tried this, but 16 beats just isnt long enough.

I owe one of those. They answered half of your question, yes you can record actually up to 8/1 beats. The utility used here is the "echo" effect. The EFX 1000 brings around 7 effects (Pitch echo/Delay/Phaser....). When you record the sound, it must be set on 8/1 and then you have a knob to specify the depth of the effect.

It wasn't designed for making "feedback loops", until people like Phil K and JZ started pushing new ideas onto it.

quote:

Originally posted by diggerz I owe one of those. They answered half of your question, yes you can record actually up to 8/1 beats. The utility used here is the "echo" effect. The EFX 1000 brings around 7 effects (Pitch echo/Delay/Phaser....). When you record the sound, it must be set on 8/1 and then you have a knob to specify the depth of the effect. It wasn't designed for making "feedback loops", until people like Phil K and JZ started pushing new ideas onto it.

so basically, its not sampling at all, its just doing an 8 count echo? i guess we'll have to wait for the EFX1000 mk2 to get a sampler.

The EFX-1000 is not a sampler.

A feedback loop is simply an 8 beat long Echo. When the time is set to 8/1, the EFX will make an echo that loops after 8 beats. By turning the depth knob to full and killing the character knob, you effectively create an echo that never degrades--hence, it's practically a sampled loop. This is pretty much an exploit.

Now, the tricky thing is that once you engage the echo effect for 8 beats, you must stop the turntable/CDJ immediately at the end of the two bars, or else both the loop and the turntable will be playing on top of each other, which will instantly redline your mixer. To get out of the loop, you basically have to kill it the instant you hotcue back into your turntable.

Would still be a rather nuts mod if you where to tinker with the onboard memory controllers and increase the lenth.

I aint cracking mine open to test though

quote:

Originally posted by Timski Would still be a rather nuts mod if you where to tinker with the onboard memory controllers and increase the lenth. I aint cracking mine open to test though

It doesn't have so much to do with memory as it does with the programming.

The various time settings range from 1/8 all the way to 8/1. Basically, these ratios, combined with the calculated BPM of the track running into the EFX, tell the EFX when to repeat the desired effect, in milliseconds.

So basically, if you were to engage a good old flange effect, and you set your time button to 2/1, what would happen is that the flange cycle would repeat after 2 beats -- x milliseconds depending on the current track's BPM. There is a knob for you to manually adjust the repeat time, so theoretically you could crank it as high as it will go (I'm not sure just how far) and get a very long feedback loop. However, this loop will not be in time, unless you actually bother to calculate the BPM/millisecond count yourself manually.

The longest useful loop you can get out of the EFX is 8 beats (2 bars). There is a trick to get a 16 beat (4 bar) loop: you hold down the TAP button, and press 4/1, which causes your BPM count to half. Thus, when you set the time back to 8/1, it is now assuming the track is half as fast as it was prior, which actually gives you a 4 bar loop. However, these are not very precise and will go out of time very quickly if you attempt to use them on top of a regular track.


Honestly, if you want a sampler then get Ableton and a SoundBite Micro. Feedback loops are more of a neat trick then an intended purpose.

Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright © 2000-2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.