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Re: zappa!(was Re: For G-bashers)



At 7:12 AM -0700 4/29/02, Evan Meyers wrote:

>does anyone know specifically if zappa ever really experimented with 
>looping

I asked Bob Rice, who was Zappa's Synclavier assistant for several 
years. Bob sez:

>yes, actually. During the sound checks for his live shows, he used to send
>everyone away and he'd just work with his guitar rig for a while at
>extremely high volume levels, mostly just improvising stuff. He'd load
>snippets into a pair of MXR digital delays with extended memory of up to, 
>I
>think, almost 4 seconds! Anyway, on the MXRs, he' d usually create 2
>different loops so if they played together they'd eventually drop out of
>sync. This was the only use for the delays in the rig and they'd have 2
>dedicated combo amps that were mic'd so that he could kick them in in the
>middle of a solo and then play over the top of them with his main rig. The
>drummer and bass player would have to find a groove based on or around the
>loops and if both were on and they went out of sync, they would listen for
>the polyrhythms that would result from the kaos. For a short amount of 
>loop
>time, there were pretty amazing possibilities for improvisation with good
>players aboard.
>
>There is a live album called Make a Jazz Noise Here that has 2 pieces that
>use quite a bit of looping. One is called Fire and Chains which uses a
>massive sample patch I built for him on the Synclavier with lots of vocal
>samples from the Senate hearings on Porn Rock lyrics (and warning labels 
>on
>records ect.), that loop around at various rates and have pitch modulation
>patched to the polyphonic aftertouch on the keyboard. You'd hold down a
>chord and use varying degrees of aftertouch on each note to change the
>speed of the samples going round and round. Again these mutant polyrhythms
>would result and you could play off of them if you could feel them.
>
>The guitar loops with the MXR delays happened at least once everynight and
>an example of that is on the cut (also on Jazz Noise) called Star Wars
>Won't Work. There's also a pretty good helping of these delay solos on the
>"Guitar" album (2 cds of Zappa guitar solos! NOt a desert island disc but
>interesting in small doses).

-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD
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