Giada - looper for live performances

which just works

18 April, 02012

Readers of my linux articles have already witnessed several quiet louigi-verona-linux-audio-life-changing events, namely din and harmonySEQ.

This time, the discovery of Giada, a live performance looper, has filled a huge gap which I did not think would be filled any time soon.

Linux teaches you caution. Whenever you see an app you never heard of before and that seems to do what you want, the question that instantly comes up is "what's the reason nobody uses it on a massive scale". But as I launched the app and began to play around with it, my caution was slowly transformed into overwhelming joy - everything worked and worked well.

Giada has a great, easy to work with GUI. You can see filenames of all the loaded samples - 32 slots available. There is a compact progressbar in form of a square showing how much of the loop is played. GUI is very responsive. Your loop slots are currently controlled via computer keyboard, MIDI control on the roadmap.
There are 6 play modes, some of which I greatly missed in samplers such as Specimen.
Of course, most importantly - Giada has sample-accurate sync.

What makes it close to Kluppe in its latest release is the Sound Editor. It is currently simple, but can manage loop points and do some simple editing.

Additionally, Giada can record. As I typically do not record and prefer to mix pre-rendered loops, I'll leave for other musicians to cover this aspect. Saving projects for later use also works.

Of course, this is young software. Of course, there are things to improve. But it does work already and I now know that during a live performance I can play house music or any other type of rhythm based music and it all will be in perfect sync.

My report would be incomplete without an actual music example. Before I switched to GNU/Linux, I used DJ Traktor Studio to mix loops. I have created a whole collection of loops to use to make live house. And so it was easy for me to just sit down and whip up some minimal beats for you. There you go: Impromptu dj set with Giada.

And then go ahead and visit Giada website, get the software and enjoy.

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