Amongst the many wonderful things you receive when you are thirty, one will be a Soundbite XL – Loop Sampler and it is indeed great. Just play the record and the sampler will pick up on the beats per minutes (if its unable to to this you can always tap it in) once you have the bpm you can tell it to record from a quater beat up to 32 beats. This a great fun and ‘perfect loops’ are only a few clicks away. Extended outros and intros for live mixes are easily done as well as creating loops to record on to pc. The recorded loops will also speed up or slow down when you are playing a new sample, so building layers of loops is easy too. The soundbite XL doesnt gave any long term memory so all loops are lost when the device is switched off, so you just have to remember from what record the sample came from after fannying about for a few hours.

Heres a quick demo of simple example with a looped sample and a beat:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Also a quick attempt at layering guitar sounds over a beat using audacity:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and whilst i’m waxing musically heres…

Some songs i have been listening to of late:

lone pigeon – concubine rice, daybre – air (feat doom), bibio – fi, felix la band – crooked breath, king biscuit time – all of black gold, kid koala – your mom’s favourite dj, pink floyd – pow r toc h , happy mondays – loose fit, gladys knight & the pips – part time love, elvis presley – gentle on my mind, tommy guerrero & gadget – mechanism, boards of canada – left side drive, clouddead , led zeppelin – What is and What Should Never Be