BINK Looper Tutorial – Scripted Looping

this video is going to assume that you basically know your way around Ableton already and that you also have some experience with looping so in this tutorial I'm going to introduce the basics of the Bing Cooper plug-in dummy clips a two channel setup for each layer and how these three concepts can be used together to create interesting live looping performances I was looking for a way to make live looping more musical and most music background layers don't just stay stagnant the whole time they change and develop and start and stop even while a different instrument is playing in the foreground with a standard traditional looper pedal achieving that kind of nuance and complexity is extremely difficult if not completely impossible but there is a new way we can get this stuff to happen automatically what I like to call scripted looping this new technique was first developed by Frank Fink you might know him as Bing beats I remember when I first watched one of his videos and I thought what the hell is going on here that's just not possible I would see him play something and it wouldn't start looping immediately but then it would just come back in like 16 measures later on its own nothing I knew about in existing software could facilitate live looping at that level of complexity but the secret is his original max for live plug-in Bing Cooper if you haven't already downloaded the software the link will be in the description but the pink looper plug-in is not actually the full picture it's meant to be used in combination with some other techniques and the whole setup can be a bit intimidating for new users I spent a lot of time now learning this system and I'm happy to share the progress that I've made by the end of this video you should have a solid grasp on all of these concepts and be able to start programming your own songs for live performance there's also going to be a lot of more advanced techniques that I'm just not gonna have time to explain in this video which is why I'm gonna start offering online private lessons for anybody who wants to take it a step further these lessons will be for anybody really wanting to dive into the details of scripting more complicated music and building a practical and sustainable workflow for writing music in this style I also believe that the basics should be available in a free tutorial for anybody who wants to learn so let's start by talking about what all the buttons on the Bing Cooper actually do the first thing we have here is the same selector so we click on this drop down menu we're gonna see a list of our scenes and we can select which scene we want to record the loop to i've got a scene here called samples so when i record a loop on this channel it's gonna get put in this clip space right here if we wanted to record more than one sample to this track we could use multiple scenes samples one samples two etc and we can switch between them using this control right here but we're gonna start with just one scene for right now the next thing we have here is the arm function if we turn it on you'll see that the track gets armed if we turn it off the track is unarmed and the reason we need this button to control another button is because the one on the beam clipper can actually be controlled by automation the next thing we have is the launch button we'll use this to start recording loops and trigger loops that are paused we also have some other important functions here like stop the clip delete the clip and quantize the clip when we click this the content will be quantized to this metronome right here some things need to be quantized in order to be groovy and now let's get to what are arguably the two most important functions on the Bing Cooper first is loop length if I want to create a two bar loop in 4/4 I'd program in here 8 beats and it'll automatically punch out after that amount of time and if I wanted Ableton to wait an amount of time before starting that loop I would use the delay function here so I could tell it to wait say 8 beats before starting to record but one thing that's really important that I say right now is that we're gonna zero everything out on this plugin just leave it all in its neutral state and that's because we're not actually going to be controlling it manually here we're going to be doing it through clip automation and that automation itself is going to take place inside of dummy clips right so what's a dummy clip it's really just an audio clip with no audio in it and as simple as that sounds it's actually really our building block for everything we're gonna be doing in this tutorial so to make some dummy clips we're actually just gonna record silence just set one track to record another track using resampling and solo and empty track so that you're getting complete silence I've got two here one short one that's about an eighth note long and one long one which should be about four to five minutes so the point of having dummy Clips is just to control automation on your track they're just placeholders for automation basically if we go over to arrangement mode and we want to automate something over a period of time we just do it in the space there we don't actually need a clip but in session mode here on our clip mode we actually need something there to hold the automation we can't just write it into the space itself and our dummy clips are these boxes that hold the automation so if you haven't already go ahead and pause this video and make some for yourself all right apologies in advance if this next section gets a little bit dry but we're breaking out the diagrams I think it's essential to have a really strong grasp on the order of operations so what happens and when let's start by imagining we have time flowing here from left to right and we're looking at three measures here and these are our beats within the measures and this is gonna be where our new scene quote-unquote begins RT equals zero so to say so thinking in terms of our loop length and delay functions on Bing Cooper this is where we're gonna start counting so imagine we're arriving at this point and we want to create a four beat loop that is to say record four beats on a certain instrument so we've got our four beats and then it's going to start looping back which is pretty much what you can already do with any looper pedal out there but what makes Bing Cooper special is that we can delay that function to record four so let's say we want to have it wait for four beats and then start that loop and then start playing back it's gonna look like this we have our four beads that's coming a bar later and then it's gonna loop back after that right so if we wanted to record eight beats and have a start looping back it would look like this and by now you probably get the idea delay four record eights delay eight record eight yeah we can program any combination these two variables into Bing Cooper as long as they're both even multiples of our global time signature so the reason I'm showing this diagram is because in addition to the delay function one thing that's really different about the looper is that we need to give it these commands in the measure beforehand so before the downbeat and to do that we're gonna launch our short dummy clips in this space we're gonna have one for each audio channel so if I want to launch them all at the same time I'm just gonna launch the whole scene and make sure that all of these short dummy clips are individually set to being unquantified not wait till the downbeat and we can actually do that at any space here in this pickup bar as long as it's not so late that it trails in to beat one of the next measure if that were to happen and we were to launch it so late that the command came through after beat one it would essentially push everything back by four beats so our record four would actually look something like a delay for record for now we're gonna zoom inside of one of those little blue boxes from the last diagram and look at the order of operations inside of our short dummy clip once again we're going to imagine time moving from left to right here and the first thing we're gonna do is tell being Kluber to arm the track and that's going to arm the track immediately there's no delaying in the arm track function the next thing we could automate is optional it's our scene selector and that's if we're going to be using more than one sample scene Bing beats himself says he only uses one I personally use two but this is just personal preference and depends on the kind of music you want to make up next we have delay which we've already talked about and after that we'll program in the loop length if we're restarting a stopped loop that's already been recorded we're going to want to make sure that the loop length is set to zero if it's not set to zero it can cause Ben Cooper to glitch and not the clip and then the last command we're gonna give it is to tell it to launch all of these commands need to happen in a very small amount of time I usually stick to about an eighth note or less at my tempo and they just need to happen in this order in that amount of time there's nothing more to it I want to make sure it's a small amount of time so that even if I were to launch it as late as like beat four in the pickup bar there's no part of that clip that's going to be so late that it slides into the next measure and push everything back all right we're going to jump in with our single channel setup this is not a viable looping method one channel it's just not enough but it's gonna help us understand the basics so let's put an instance of Bing Cooper on this channel and make sure that our scene selector is set to samples and that we have a scene here called samples where the loop will get recorded two and zero everything out here on the pin clip itself we're also going to want to make sure that we have some kind of audio input here it could be a microphone keyboard really doesn't matter just needs to make noise we're also going to set our monitor to auto this is extremely important here and for right now let's just send our audio to the master Channel let's also keep the mixer a completely neutral right now so nothing on the pan sends or anything like that so we're gonna be working with our short dummy clip here first don't worry about the long one and we're just going to copy that up here to another scene like scene 3 or something let's make sure it's enabled and color coded correctly and let's call it record 4 in order to actually get it to record 4 let's go down to our clip envelopes here and follow our pattern from before so the first thing will be arming the track the next thing we're gonna do would be scene selector but since we're just gonna stick with one scene right now we're just gonna leave that blank next thing would be delay but we're not going to delay so we're just gonna go straight to loop length and we're going to drag that up here to 4 and you'll see here that I actually have it set at 0 first before it goes to 4 theoretically you could just drag the whole thing to 4 like this but I've noticed that Bing Cooper can glitch when you don't have the the buffer area of zero here in the beginning so I always like to make sure that the clip starts with zero refreshes the bank looper and then moves up to the number that I want it to at a 90-degree angle and the last command I'm gonna give Bing Cooper is to launch so that's just as simple as dragging it from not launching to launching and and one last thing here we're gonna make sure that our quantization in this clip is set to none that's so that when I launch it in the pickup bar it's not gonna wait till b1 to start it's gonna give all those commands to ping Cooper before b1 let's try this out and launch it in the pickup bar and we're gonna see that it records for four beats punches out on its own and starts looping before we move on to anything more complicated let's just practice the delay real quick so we're gonna call this delay for record four and I usually label the clip so I remember what's in them and we're gonna go back down to the delay function in our clip envelopes so we're gonna have it a zero here and drag it up to four and make sure that it's somewhere between arm and loop length somewhere in the middle there let's try that out and make sure it works I'm going to launch it in the middle the bar and it's gonna wait for four beats and start recording and then automatically punch out on its own and start looping alright so let's say we want to have one instrument and record multiple loops in succession we're gonna make a second channel and make sure that they're both set to the sample scene of course so that the loop on this channel is going to get recorded to this spot and the loop on the first channel is going to get recorded to this spot on the first channel I'm gonna just want to record for eight beats so let's go down here to the delay and make sure that that is set to zero and I'm also going to go over to loop length and change that to eight beats so I'm gonna option drag this clip over here and copy it to audio too and let's call this delay a to record eight and I just got to make the clip the right color of course and so let's go down to the envelopes again and I will notice that the automation copied over which means the loop length is already set to eight from the clip before it's perfect delay will set to 8 as well additionally you'll notice that both of my tracks here are not armed and that when I launch the scene both clips will launch at the same time which will tell their tracks to armed immediately I'm also going to play some basic loops on my hand pan just to show you what I'm doing some of you might already be noticing a problem which is channel bleed and what that means is if we have both of our audio sources set on the same instrument then when we start playing we're gonna hear that sound coming through on both channels but we only want to have it on the first channel in this case we don't want to hear channel 2 until beat 9 when we want its loop to start and if we had more channels that bleed would get duplicated on every single channel we have armed so the solution is a 2 channel setup for each single channel I know the terminology is little confusing because we just had two channels but what I mean is a second channel for each of those channels so let's clarify some of the terminology what's called the first channel the audio source channel that's because it's actually pulling the audio from like an actual audio source like microphone or instrument or whatever could also be MIDI and then the second one is going to be called an effects channel and it's simply an extension of the signal flow of that sound so the sound is going to flow out of our source channel into our effects channel and then finally into the master Channel or a bus or a group or something like that and the purpose of having this effects channel is to use our long dummy clips which will be playing simultaneously to the loops on the source channel and they're going to control things like when the channel gets muted and any effects we want to put on that channel reverbs delays etc and the reason why we have to do this on a separate channel is because each channel can only play one clip at a time and since we're recording that loop that clip on the source channel in real time we won't be able to pre program that Automation there we need to pre-program that automation on our long dummy clips on the effects channel okay hope that make sense so let's make some effects channels here and I usually make them greige makes it easier to see and we'll label them effects and source so on the source channel we're gonna go down to audio too and send it to our effects channel and on the effects channel unintuitive Li we're gonna select no input here on the audio from this just means it's not gonna have its own audio source like our source channel and will allow the audio to pass in by selecting in on our monitor if you're following along just pause it right here and make sure that everything looks just like this let's put all that theory into practice and copy a long dummy clip over to our channel too and remember we want to solve this problem of channel bleed we're gonna go down to quantization and make sure it's set to global this time and this is on purpose remember I want to make sure my short dummy clip here that launches Ben Cooper is set to none whereas this time on my long dubbing clip I'm gonna make sure it's set to global so that it runs exactly simultaneous to our loops now let's go over here and drag a utility effect onto our effect channel this is arguably the most important effect we'll be using and we're gonna call this mute and I'm gonna go ahead and turn the mute function on and I'm going to automate the on and off function on the whole device rather than the mute button itself because for some reason when you just press the mute button it can create a popping sound in your audio whereas if you just automate the whole device to turn on and off it doesn't do that I'm also just going to leave it on all the time so that the default state is muted and we have to turn it off to let audio pass through and let's just go ahead and copy that over onto our audio 1 effects channel we'll need that later and just as good practice I have one on every single effects channel in my set so remember we're trying to make sure that our audio to channel is muted while we're recording the audio 1 loop let's go down into our envelopes and make sure that the device on is selected on our mute effect and for the first eight beats we're gonna make sure that that mute stays on like it is by default and then on beat nine when we want the audio to start passing through Channel - we're gonna unmute it here and let's just leave it off so it just keeps looping after that alright so I'm going to copy this over to our channel one effects and we can just click here on the device on and off to see the automation come up and our automation got copied over from channel 2 so we don't need that right now delete that and we're gonna want to make sure that the audio comes through on the first eight beats on this one because that's what we want to hear so let's go down and unmute the track for the first eight beats then just for the example let's say that yeah we don't want to hear our channel one after the first eight beats so we wanted to stop a once channel two starts recording so we'll leave the mute on starting in beat nine and then after the next eight beats we'll bring it back in so this will be really easy to hear so notice how nothing's coming out of our audio - effects and now audio one effects is muted and they both play together so similar to our mutes we're gonna put our effects on our FX channel let's go here and put a simple delay on our FX channel just quickly set this up here it doesn't really matter what it is and let's put the dry/wet at 0 by default now we're gonna go into our clip and we can use the mute here as a reference to see where we're at and I'm gonna go back to my simple delay dry/wet and just bring that up here on beat 4 [Music] and we can do some different stuff here on our audio to channel so it's put a simple delay on that add some syncopation maybe and also we've the dry/wet at zero we'll go here real quick and automate that over a period of time and see how that sounds so I'm sure you're already starting to see the potential here this can be as detailed and as nuanced as you want to make it I [Music] do most of my starting and stopping eclipse with mutes but there are times when it's just not going to work and we have to actually stop the clip so let's imagine a scenario in which we want to stop our eight beat loop and bring it back in after only four beats but have it be at the beginning of the clip we can't do that with mutes because if we muted it for four and brought it back in it would just be on its beat five but we want it to start over on one after four beats so we're actually gonna have to stop the clip for four beats and start it again so I'm gonna use the next scene to stop our loop that's currently playing and I'm going to use the scene after that to relaunch it so stopping this loop is actually pretty easy all we really have to do is nothing it already has a stop button built in when the space is empty here so let's play the clip here and let's imagine it's actually playing I've got it muted right now we've got our equip playing and I'm gonna launch this next scene here and you'll see that it just stops all right so the clip is stopped playing and it stopped on beat one because it's quantized and this stop button is very useful to us right now because we just want this one to stop playing but over here on our drum Channel so to say on channel one we want the drums to keep going so we're actually going to get rid of that stop button using command II and now when I get that playing and launch the next scene you get that both playing actually and I'll launch the scene you'll see that the channel two is going to stop while channel one keeps playing so if we just don't want something to stop on the next scene we just get rid of those stop buttons like this just for right now I'm just gonna do that on both of our effects channels as well and keep those playing so that our mutes just stay unmuted the whole time now we could actually put new long dummy clips in these spots here with the mute just set to be unmuted but for right now I'm just gonna get rid of the stop buttons and let them keep playing save some time and since we're launching the next scene let's go ahead and delete those stop buttons as well so now when I launch these next two scenes the only thing we're gonna be affecting is our channel 2 source and we're gonna use this next scene scene 5 here to relaunch this clip so we need a new short dummy clip to control the Bing Cooper and we're gonna call this play we're gonna go down to our envelopes again under Bing Cooper and go to launch and we're just going to enable launch that's the only thing we're gonna do so when I click this it's going to launch that clip and if I go over here to scene 4 again click that it's gonna stop it and then I can go back and start it again and you'll notice that I'm still clicking these buttons before the downbeat around beat 3 or so is good practice all right so we got everything playing again and we're coming to the point where maybe we want our melody clip to stop for four beats and come back in on day one so we're gonna launch scene forward to stop it and scene 5 2 3 back in one to launch and stop to launch and play and we'll see here now that the two clips are four beats out of sync with each other do it again stop to launch and and now they're back in sync all right so let's pretend we want our drums to drop out on scene five here when that clip comes back in so command e bring that stop button back in and we'll hear that sounds like oh and the four beats are just completely arbitrary it could be really any number that's not a multiple of eight like twelve twenty thirty six whatever that means it calls for one to launch and stop launch all right so we've covered a lot of ground in this video but how do we go from something simple like this to a full song unfortunately the only advice I can give you is to practice and have patience if you followed along for the whole video up to this point you actually have all the building blocks you need to get started if you're able to record loops with preset lengths and delays use long dummy clips to automate mutes and effects and stop and start clips when you need to that's pretty much it well kind of two big things that are missing from this video are how to use Ableton's built-in looper plug-in to do polyrhythmic looping so recording loops that aren't a multiple of your global time signature and general tips for getting from the composition stage over to session mode with clips and Bing Cooper it can be a little bit daunting to take a full song that's already composed with all of its automation and move it over into clips and I can pretty much guarantee you're gonna make some mistakes along the way and honestly just this subject could be a two-hour long tutorial but I recommend just practicing experimenting trying things out and the more you do that the better you're gonna understand the whole process both at a macro and micro which will hopefully lead to new ideas [Music]

Channel: connor shafran

Views: 37,088

Keywords: bink looper, bink-looper, binkbeats, loop, live loop, live looping, bink, scripted looping, hands-free looping, dummy-clips, dummy clips, clips, ableton, ableton live, live 9, live 10, looper, delayed looping, looping technology

Id: 4TpMLmO_JJc

Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BascoTheBear]

Hey everyone, I just released this comprehensive Bink Looper tutorial, and I figured this sub would appreciate it. I go into detail on how to set up Bink Looper, use dummy clips, and build a signal flow to facilitate "scripted" looping (or "hands-free" looping). Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll do my best to answer them :)

[u/GoHenDog]

This is great, have you a template Audition file?

[u/edible_string]

Sorry for digging up an old thread. but I've just watched your video, found it really clear and comprehensive, so thank you for that. I can not however tell just yet how is the Binklooper approach better than just automating the Ableton's Looper plugin in the arrangement view. Can you say where would that fall apart with a larger composition vs the Bink?