Looper difficulties

[Giacomo17]

Great little effect, but I feel like it could be more user friendly, at least initially.

Here's what I've been wanting to do live: to be able to loop a phrase, play over it for awhile (not overdubbing), then stop the loop playback as I resume playing that original loop again myself (using a MIDI foot controller to trigger both Looper's stop and clear), so I can make embellishments on it, loop it differently, or conclude the song.

The Looper has given me a few troubles with that:

1) whenever I hit stop on the Looper, it hits stop on Live's global transport (since I have song control set to "start and stop song"), which, for some reason, cuts out any MIDI input while I'm pressing stop. Therefore, I can't smoothly transition from a loop playback to me actually playing that looped phrase myself, since the stop button cuts off my sound.

2) I want to Live to help me out with quantizing my punch in/punch out points, so that my loops are more consistently in time. But the only way that I see that I can do that is if I set my tempo first, turn on the metronome, hit Live's play button, then punch in and start playing at the start of the metronome's next bar. That just seems ridiculous to me. I'd have to wear headphones onstage or something to follow the metronome. Isn't there an easier way to get consistent, clean loops from Ableton's Looper?

3) I can't overdub. Whenever I loop a phrase, and the orange bars then say I'm in overdub mode, it only stays in overdub mode for three beats or so then automatically switches over to play mode. wtf?

Thanks so much for all the help folks. I love playing with the Looper, but this stuff just has me in knots.

Kyle

[yur2die4]

I don't know if you are aware of this or not. It may not even be one of the problems you're having haha, but Always Always map the button on Looper to a midi note and not a control change. If you are already doing that, that is great. If not, you would be surprised how unpredictably Looper can act haha

[Giacomo17]

Thanks, that advice fixed the problem I was having with overdubbing, problem #3. (I just reprogrammed my foot controller to send MIDI notes instead of control changes). But my other two problems are still a massive pain in the ass. Any other ideas?