If you’ve ever seen KT Tunstall perform live, you’ve been witness to the amazing electronic (g)eargasm that is her one woman show… courtesy of the excellent repoire she has established with the various Japanese guitar toys she uses to create her music. it’s really quite amazing to see. Kate uses an Akai Headrush pedal to loop layers of herself singing, playing guitar or drumming and builds up tunes right in front of you in real time…

A similar, more recent device which I happen to own is the Digitech Jamman - which is kindof awesome… it lets you loop up to 99 samples onto a CF memory card and dump it all to USB, load it into your favourite audio sequencer and process your samples to your hearts content.

It’s the core of my own setup for live, improvised electronic performance but has always let me down because of the complete lack of MIDI sync or a tempo variable that you can explicitly set. This basically means you really can’t integrate it into your computer setup live… It’s virtually impossible to sync your computer and Jamman by tapping in the tempo on your Jamman. it certainly isn’t anywhere near consistent enough to use in a performance environment where it needs to be absolutely synchronized….

That is, until now…

If you look at the XML file that is generated whenever you save a sample on the Jamman, you’ll see a Tempo parameter:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<JamManLoopSetup>
<LoopMode>Loop</LoopMode>
<Tempo>24055</Tempo>
<TimeSignature>2</TimeSignature>
<RhythmType>1</RhythmType>
<StopMode>Stop</StopMode>
</JamManLoopSetup>

I knew I could get something cool out of this value, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it, until Bill Clayton from Digitech let me in on a little secret. Like the flux capacitor, it’s the key to bringing the planets back into alignment and getting all your gear to work together in time…

BPM = 2646000 / <Tempo> (264600 = Sampling Rate * 60 seconds.. ie. 44100*60)

Therefore in the example above - the loop is saved as 2646000 / 24055 = 110 BPM

When you plug the Jamman in initially, it will default to this base tempo… so you can then load whatever sample you want… look up it’s value in the XML file and then set your computer’s tempo appropriately. Voila - the two systems, your computer and all devices that are synced to it and your Jamman will now completely play in sync… kind of half assed but I’ll take it.  Now I can actually use this thing as a tool for live performance, instead of just playing around by myself…

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