The way I do it with guitar is to have a master guitar track with all my effects and stuff on it, then send that audio to multiple different tracks within Live, each with a separate looper on it. Then you can control volume, play/pause/speed up each loop separately.

Same here. Much simpler than getting looper doing what you want in a complex setting.

the key here i think is to be able to use 1 control.... 1 foot pedal to control the 'looping' process... but still being able to split the parts onto different tracks in order to mute them...

my hands will be occupied playing in parts on the guitar, mic and keyboard so i can quickly hit buttons to loop and stop looping...

Live has a sweet feature that allows you to drag loops as sound files from Looper into the arrangement or clips windows... it sounds like what you want is a m4l effect that does this for you. While it would be impossible (I think) to separate the audio onto different tracks in Live , you could make something in Max that records to a new buffer every time you do a new overdub. Then it would be up to you to make the volume controls, etc. for each overdub. The way I would do that (which is probably the least efficient way, knowing me) might be like this:

but then again tapin~/tapout~ might work better with overdubbing in general.

I use the setup first described by mbryo and control it entirely with a behringer FCB.

So if you aren't interested in doing "overdubs", then I'd revert to looping with Live, as with the "1 input track" method. Using a max patch to modify the midi coming from the pedal would come in handy.

thankyou all for your help peeps!!!