The Linux Journal presents this tutorial on FreeWheeling, software that allows you to create audio looping.
In this month's column, I take a look at the latest version of FreeWheeling and consider its basic capabilities. FreeWheeling has features I haven't explored yet, but even its basic use shows off FreeWheeling's musicality.
A few years ago, one of my students performed a rather unique original piece at a local coffee house. He used one guitar, one bass, his voice and a foot-controlled hardware device called a loop sampler. The sampler recorded brief segments played on the guitar or bass and then fed them back out as repeating audio loops. The sonic result was a texture of seven looping guitar parts and two looping bass parts. When the texture was built to his liking, he then added his vocal, singing a non-looped song over the looping sounds. At the climax of the song, he simply stopped the sampler on an appropriate beat, and the crowd went wild.
JP Mercury's FreeWheeling program is the software equivalent of that loop sampler. Of course, features have been added that are possible only in software, making FreeWheeling a powerful loop-based performance tool.
