MGS - Welcome Gary from Backline to musicgearsource.com
G - Thanks. Glad to be here.
MGS - First off can you give us a history of how you got into guitar effects?
G - I was always interested in music. When I was about 17, I started playing guitar and also built a synthesizer using parts from an old Vox organ. I formed a band with my best friend who also played the guitar. We played 70’s rock so I bought a 1970s 50 watt Marshall head and build a replica Marshall 4x12 cabinet for it and loaded it with some used Greenbacks. I also build a homemade guitar floor effects pedal with distortion, compressor, flanger and delay. The thing weighed a ton!
After collage, I took a job designing semiconductors and stopped playing. Fifteen years later, I felt that it was time to renew my love of guitar and guitar electronics. I bought some Line 6 gear, and that got me interested in the endless possibilities of digital guitar effects. I wrote a free software editor for the Line 6 Vetta amp and then decided to form Backline Engineering based on an idea I had for a new type of looper.
MGS - What was it in the current crop of loopers out there that drove you to make your own?
G- Since I play guitar at home in my spare time, I thought it would be great to be able to lay down a rhythm part to play over, so I bought a Boss RC-20. With this type of looper (and many others on the market), you need to time your footswitch press to your playing at exactly the right time in order to avoid a glitch when the loop repeats. I found that I could do this only about 30% of the time.
MGS - What were the main things you wanted to fix about loopers?
G - First of all, I wanted to focus on playing live. If you want to record things ahead of time and store them, you could do this on a laptop or personal multi-track recorder. Triggering pre-recorded loops live, does not give the audience a good sense of your talent. Playing something live and then having it repeat shows that you have the talent to play it all. Who knows where the pre-recorded stuff came from?
Next, I wanted it to be easy to use in a live situation. People do not want to add a large pedal board to their current set of floor effects so I wanted to make a small unit. Also, people do not want to tap dance on foot pedals while they are playing. I wanted to minimize that.
Finally, the most important thing was to always achieve accurate loop timing. I wanted the looper to recognize the notes or chords that you play, and use the time when you play a note or chord as the trigger point for loop timing. I applied for a patent on this idea.
MGS - Tell us about the Riffbox and its features.
G - RiffBox has many different ways to capture loop timing. You can time it to a footswitch press, just like all the other loopers on the market. You can time the loop to when you play a note or chord. Or, you can close a loop when you play a certain note since RiffBox can also recognize the value of single notes. RiffBox can also recognize repeated rhythm or note patterns and start the loop playback automatically when these patterns are repeated. These various loop capture modes allow you to focus on your playing without thinking about the next time you need to hit a footswitch.
There are 76 different loop playback modes that can be stored in 100 preset locations. For example, you can use manual or automatic layering, you can have the loop fade away while you record another layer, you can have the loop playback automatically stop after a certain number of measures or you can have the loop length automatically multiply when you record a new layer. There are also other modes such as reverse and half-speed. It has up to 80 seconds of loop time with CD quality audio.
The extensive MIDI capabilities allow you to do some other interesting things. If you have an existing guitar effects pedal board with MIDI outputs, you can control the looping functions of RiffBox from that pedal board. For example, selecting a rhythm patch on your pedal board also arms RiffBox for loop recording. When it is time for your solo, press a lead patch on your pedal board. This also stops loop recording and starts loop playback on RiffBox. No tap dancing required. RiffBox can send MIDI output clocks to an external drum machine which will be perfectly timed you the loop playback. Since RiffBox remembers when you played each note or chord in the loop, you can use MIDI commands to shorten and then lengthen the loop playback timed to when you played these notes or chords.
MGS - Why should someone buy this instead of X looper?
G - Again, it is intended for people who want to loop in a live situation. Unique features such as loop closure based on note timing and loop control from other pedal boards allow you to concentrate on your playing and not your equipment. No other device has as many loop playback modes that can be stored as presets for recall during a live show. The relatively small size compared to other loopers allows you to add it to your existing pedal board. Also, you will not find loopers with the extensive MIDI capabilities that are available in RiffBox.
MGS - The FX tracker looks really great. Please tell us all about it.
G - The idea for FX-Tracker came out of RiffBox. With RiffBox, you can create delay effects with the delay time matching the loop length. I wanted to take this one step further with FX-Tracker by having the delay time continuously adjust to your playing speed. This evolved into having chorus, tremolo, flanger and filter effects with periods or envelops timed to your playing. It also has a pitch shifter like effect that allows you to trigger whammy like dive bombs or change arpeggio intervals every time you play a note. An additional delay can be placed before after or in parallel with the other effects. You can also send MIDI waveforms, envelopes and arpeggio patterns to other devices based on your playing. Too much to describe here, you should check out the web site.
MGS - Do you play live?
G - Not anymore. Although my son is a drummer so we play together sometimes.
MGS - Do you use your pedals live?
G - No, but I do have a blast playing with RiffBox where I can be a one man band.
MGS - Do you have anything on the bench that you are working on?
G - I do have a lot of ideas for future products such as rack mounted pro versions, but I have invested so much money up to this point and I need to spend time on the marketing front to get these products off the ground before I invest in new developments.
MGS - Have you had any high profile players check these pedals out yet?
G - I have shipped RiffBox to the Woven and Spiral Arms for them to check out. No famous name players yet. But I do see a trend with some players such as Tom Morello of Audioslave to experiment with new sounds.
MGS - Where are these pedals made and how many people are involved in the construction process?
G - These pedals are made in California and are fairly simple to assemble. I designed them with no wires; everything is attached to the PC board. I use one company here in Camarillo to fabricate and paint the chassis and another local company to fabricate the boards. My son helps me assemble and test them.
MGS - What are your thoughts on true bypass vs. buffered?
G - I have mixed opinions on this. If you have just a few pedals and cables that are not too long, true bypass might be a good thing. If you have long cables or many effects, you will need to buffer the signal at some point to avoid high frequency loss. I would beware of the super expensive cables with the ‘magic’ ingredients.
MGS - Are retailers catching on to these pedals yet?
G - We currently have three retailers carrying these pedals and are always on the hunt for more.
MGS - Where do you see looping/loopers headed in the future?
G - My view is that loopers are intended for enhancing live performances with additional backing parts. Down the road, I could imagine loopers that analyze what is recorded in the loop and then lay down other appropriate instrumental parts such as a bass line or a drum part. Loopers could be integrated with other technology such as intelligent harmonizers or drum machines to create all kinds of interesting possibilities.
MGS - Thanks so much for chatting with us and best of luck to you Gary.
G - Thanks for putting this together.