Old Electrix Repeater users

Montrealbreaks · Post by **Montrealbreaks** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 2:53 pm

Just wondering how many out there migrated to Live from an Electrix Repeater? Do you still own your Repeater? I sold mine for a clean thousand US, do you think their price will drop when more folks start using Live?

What did you like about the Repeater? What did you hate about it?

L8er
Montrealbreaks

Psylocubik · Post by **Psylocubik** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 3:28 pm

Greetings,

I actually use both Live and a Repeater.

I have tried various setups with Live to do looping but it has never been able to live up to the Repeater... Plus, separating the functions of Live and the Repeater also adds stability to the live show. One can crash, which both have done (thankfully at different times), and I'm not dead in the water.

I use Live to do a mixture of scene based stuff and sequenced stuff; controlling it with a FCB1010. I use the Repeater to loop my synths. Everything all synced.

Cheers....

pcubik

pixelmechanic · Post by **pixelmechanic** » Thu Feb 26, 2004 1:16 pm

Like Psylocubik I use a hardware looper as part of my setup too...In this case it's an Echoplex sync'ed to live.

I can't comment on the repeater but I find the features and footpedal of the 'plex more intuitive to use when I'm playing guitar, and when I've got a loop I want to keep I simply arm the channel in live and record the loop (there's a little latency but nothing that can't be compensated for afterwards), then clear the loop in my 'plex...

I'd have preferred the repeater tho...Stereo!!

Anyway, those interested in repeater might find this useful:

http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/ ... er-01.html

Includes plenty comments from David Torn (looping guitarist without equal)

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Thu Feb 26, 2004 10:58 pm

pixelmechanic wrote:Like Psylocubik I use a hardware looper as part of my setup too...In this case it's an Echoplex sync'ed to live.

I can't comment on the repeater but I find the features and footpedal of the 'plex more intuitive to use when I'm playing guitar, and when I've got a loop I want to keep I simply arm the channel in live and record the loop (there's a little latency but nothing that can't be compensated for afterwards), then clear the loop in my 'plex...

I'd have preferred the repeater tho...Stereo!!

Anyway, those interested in repeater might find this useful:

http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/ ... er-01.html

Includes plenty comments from David Torn (looping guitarist without equal)

Thanks for that link with the Torn quotes.
I, for one, cannot imagine using the laptop as a looping device live on stage anytime soon. Hardeware just seems so much more intuitive, simple to operate as Live may be..............

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 27, 2004 1:08 pm

I sent the Repeater back the day after I got it. Didn't loop accurately enough for dance music.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 27, 2004 1:55 pm

FORMAT wrote:quote]

Thanks for that link with the Torn quotes.
I, for one, cannot imagine using the laptop as a looping device live on stage anytime soon. Hardeware just seems so much more intuitive, simple to operate as Live may be..............

Why does Live seems so bad as a looping device on stage? I think it blows hardware away, and use it on stage almost weekly as a looper, building songs from scratch. With a midi footpedal, you've instantly got at least five loops to control (5 pedals for start rec/loop, 5 for arm recording for the 5 tracks). The process of looping is exactly the same as hardware--hit a button to start record, hit it again to loop. One of the huge advantages to Live over looping hardware for me is that I can not only hear a click track for tempo in my phones, but can set the global quantize to "bar" and be able to hit the foot pedal anytime during a measure, instead of having to nail the foot pedal press precisely on the onw (twice) to get a good loop. This is huge--with hardware you have to really concentrate on keeping a solid tempo and nailing those pedal presses or you're wasting your time. On longer phrases this is particularly challenging, and if you just barely hit the foot pedal to early or late at the end of a long phrase, it will start to drift out. Live makes it so you don't have to sweat the tempo or the tap dance, and can concentrate on playing the parts well.

Other advantages--the ability to have each loop on it seperate stereo channel, each loop has individual pan, volume, and effects and sends scheme, and each can be crossfaded. You can delete or copy or move clips after you've recorded them in Live. I can't imagine going back to hardware looping, after day 1 with Live I was hooked.

The only advantages of some hardware devices that I see are the reverse and overdub functions (I bet we'll see them in Live someday), the midi mappable "delete" for deleting flubbed clips on the fly (Bomes midi trans. on pc and midipipe on mac take care of this), and some synced gating effects that the echoplex offers.

Ryan

montrealbreaks · Post by **montrealbreaks** » Fri Feb 27, 2004 3:57 pm

As a guy who used to use a repeater for looping breakbeats and recording basslines from a synth, I wasn`t really using the overdubbing feature of the Repeater. Therefore, since I had both hands free, I found Live much more Controllable. I could see a guitarist disagreeing however, as the overdubbing was the MOST critical feature for a guitarist looping themselves.

I really thought about keeping the Repeater and syncing it to Live, but I have ALWAYS had MIDI timing issues. I don`t know if it's my hyper critical ear, or every piece of MIDI gear I have owned has had wonky timing, but I could never get two devices to sync over midi satisfactorily. Sooo, for me, since Live is an "all in one" solution to loop work, synchronization became no longer an issue. Add to that the current value of Repeaters, and I HAD to dump it on ebay. I paid like $700 Canadian and got $1000 US, and I used it for two and a half years - not bad!!!

BUT, the Electrix products were the absolutely best looking and best designed rack gear ever to hit the market. I went and bought one of each of their gear and filled up 12 rack spaces with a 2 Filter Queens, 2 EQ Killers, a Warp Factory, a Repeater, a Mo-FX and a Filter Factory. It sounded pretty good (except the Mo-FX) and looked spectacular, and except for the Repeater, was all procured cheaply second hand, so it didn`t cost me a fortune. Sold most of it now, but it was cool for a while...

L8er
Montrealbreaks

illsub1 · Post by **illsub1** » Tue Mar 02, 2004 6:44 pm

Any of you guys know where to get a replacement part for the repeater. I broke a fader

The e-mail on their site does not work. I need my 4th track bad.

montrealbreaks · Post by **montrealbreaks** » Tue Mar 02, 2004 9:15 pm

illsub1 wrote:Any of you guys know where to get a replacement part for the repeater. I broke a fader The e-mail on their site does not work. I need my 4th track bad.

Good luck dude. Try ebay, otherwise I think you won't find one. Electrix went out of business a couple of years ago - they were bought by a company that does Karaoke stuff. You might also try Loopers Delight, maybe somebody has a broken down repeater you could buy for parts.

http://www.loopers-delight.com/loop.html

I have NO IDEA why a company that made such great gear, that sold so well, would go out of business. Their products and marketing were both good, so it's a mystery to me. They must have had some bad gambling debts with the mafia or something!

(just kiddin.)

More likely it was Canada's ruthless corporate taxation. I live in one of the worst countries to be a business owner, and those Electrix folks were Canadian if I recall.

Seriously though, I don't understand what killed Electrix. If anybody knows, I would love to find out.

L8er
Montrealbreaks.

rajcoont · Post by **rajcoont** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 12:28 am

it was the repeater that killed them actually. They spent all their R&D on it, and it turned into a real nightmare for them where they had hyped it up so much, and couldn't get it out the door, and by the time it shipped, it was going to be impossible to recoup their $$$ on it as the margins were tiny..or something like that. They were out of vancouver somewhere, and you would hear the stories through word of mouth, but i do believe it was the ambitiousness of the repeater with such a young comany that sunk them....the closing out deals they had on their gear were insane. many people i know got one of everything (save the repeater) for about 500 bucks cdn....

paulc · Post by **paulc** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 7:01 pm

I've been using my Repeater with live... Its much easier to capture loops of guitar/bass on the repeater using my FCB1010 foot controller. After I capture some loops to the repeater i resample them up into live and can start adding effects/tweakin the clips'

-- Paul

Per Boysen · Post by **Per Boysen** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 11:40 pm

I still keep my Repeater and I'm not selling it until I will have to. I use it together with Live and an Echoplex hardware looper. What I like with the Repeater is that it's following tempo and timestretching when synced to midi clock. There are many things I don't like that much but the good stuff makes up for it. I quite often bring the Repeater out of sync and down to 1 BPM to get that grainy sound. I also like that you can record in stereo, then split the stereo tracks into two mono tracks panned L/R and time shift them a little. This trick will make a pad or drone sound HUGE in stereo! Finally I like that almost everything is available by external midi (foot pedals), which is not yet the case with Live.

Oh, and since I like overdub looping and reverse playback both Repeater and the Echoplex make a great complement to Ableton Live.

illsub1 · Post by **illsub1** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 4:25 am

The guitar repair guy at my store did the ultimate gerryrig with a piece of wood, fender screw, a couple washers, and super glue. THANK GOD!!! I can't live w/out this piece either. What other footpedal can you use? I have a 3 button digitech fs300 but if there is one that could do more that would be really nice. When I play I am using both my hands so much that I need live to be a little more intuitive with recording live loops. It would be nice to have a one button option to duplicate the current track, copy the just recorded loop to the new track and keep flowing. Then they wouldn't have to incorporate overdubbing in a traditional sense. A single loop is only a bounce away. This would be a simple addition in addition to the transpose being midi controllable.

If BT gets custom D-Beam controllers and "stutter plugs" give me the poorman this so I can compete! (BTW thanx to BT for helping pioneer this software, I got some really nice tips from him like a hi pass filter into a simple delay on the master and having the freq, q, envelope, L+R delay, dry/wet, and feedback controllable. I love this.)

But back to the repeater, I feel bad for Electrix, that pedal was breaking major ground and could have been developed even more. I can do so much with it.

For more info, check out our site! The next album will be recorded next week with 90% live and some live footage will be posted soon as well as some samples and new music.

KEEP THE REPEATER ALIVE!!!

Benihana
Ill Subliminal
www.illsub.com

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 10:26 am

I don't understand what killed Electrix. If anybody knows, I would love to find out.

As best as I understand it, there were a number of problems - they spent a lot on advertising, and hyped the repeater, but kept postponing its release. This pissed off retailers who had pre-sold some of them, and it was not ready in time. They responded to this state of affairs by mysteriously cancelling all of their excellent early product line except the Repeater, which made little sense to me after having spent so much on promoting FF, WF, etc.

I think the parent company, IVL (which makes tons of $ writing pitch shifting software for digitech, and even more for their work on karaoke machines), may have tightened the purse strings at exactly the wrong times. The machines themselves are gorgeous (I have three), and well designed (midi implementation is awesome - they make good controllers for Live) but there were power supply issues, and other quality control problems - I love them, but have to admit they are all pretty noisy. A very sad, and still somewhat mystifying story.

e.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 10:27 am

I sure screwed that quote up...

e.

Old Electrix Repeater users

Old Electrix Repeater users

Repeater User here...