This has come up during another post but it is such a pivotal thing in performance that I think it is worth its own post. Has anybody found a way to send a click track wirelessly?
In about 99% of performances where there are machines and more than one musician there is a click track. What drummer isn't playing with headphones these days? If the cans aren't on bet your boots there's a monitor dedicated to the click. We've been playing with loopy in our band for a few months now and it's the only phone/tablet app that we would use seriously, because you can do all your basic stuff without moving through menus. We don’t use lots of sounds, just a few simple loops and single shots to augment the sound. But inevitably we run into this issue - once the clock has started you all have to stay with it otherwise you sound really bad. Really bad. We’ve played with a couple of songs here and there, but we’ve decided not to use Loopy until I can work out how to send a click track to the others. We won’t take the risk that we’ll be embarrassed by falling off the clock.
I’ve tried some midi things – putting Loopy on other devices, connect to my phone hotspot so that everyone else can connect, use my phone as a clock input and turn on a click or whatever sound they want. But it’s horribly unreliable. Same if we use other apps to slave to Loopy. The click generally runs a bit behind which would be ok if the latency was always the same, but it’s not and is often way out. So I tried connecting a Bluetooth receiver, put a click on one Loopy pad and pan left, pan everything else right. But it’s clumsy, you have to split the sound at the other end, can only connect one device and then all your other samples are in mono. And you lose one sound pad.
I could probably get something like the iRig midi interface and run cables to trigger other devices with a click. But I have the iphone/ipod taped to the side of my bass with bluetoothed audio to an amp and it’s such a sweet simple set up which is unobtrusive, doesn’t tie me down with foot pedals and which works. I don’t want everyone cabled up, there are already lots of ways we can do that and I’m loving Loopy and hoping it will set us free!
Anybody got ideas?
Potsy