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Looper's Delight
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>Anybody want to share a few moments that made them realize that they had >no alternative other than to become a loopster? Or shining moments? My interest in it started in the late 70's/early 80's when I was playing with rock bands and had two cheap-o tape Echoplex knock-offs with different lengths. Being a bit of a harmony freak from way back, one fun thing I used to do with them was play a series of intervals (verystraight witha clean dry guitar sound) in one and then a series of intervals in another in unrelated keys sometimes in different registers, other times all within the same octave, then set them both to looping at different lengths to hear how they recombined harmonically. Biggest lesson I learned from this: rock bands have no interest in this stuff. My looping in band situations was pretty much limited to droney textural bits when my focus as a player began to get clearer and I realized that when everyone was telling me what a drag it was that I couldn't just come up with "a solo" for each song and play it right, that really what I was craving was improvisational experience. I then exited the more straight-ahead song oriented rock world and got involved in some free improvising rock bands that were a bit of an offshoot of the early 80's arty-punk sorta thing but started to become frustrated by what seemed to be a willful disdain for knowing what the fuck you were doing which was sorta part & parcel of the times in the avant-rock world or so it seemed. I then realized to try to get deeper into being an improvisor it would help to be able to study a tradition in which improvising was integral. Granted, there's many great traditions like this all over the world, but being an American we have a great one right here that I could sink my teeth into, so I took a roughly 15-year detour into studying and playing jazz as much as possible. Not to say that I've even come close to mastering that particular idiom, but after studying what jazz has to offer in terms of harmonic improvisation, melodic development, free improvising, standard song forms, blues forms, etc., in the last few years I've found the road diverging again, where I'm realizing that my loyalty to jazz is as a vehicle or method for improvisation, not preservation or expanding of the jazz tradition, as much as I respect it. I'm an improvisor first, jazz musician second. Maybe looper third or so. I've spent the last couple years revisiting and refining a lot of the old things I learned about sound processing and specifically looping (though now it's a Lexicon LXP-5 and Digitech 7.6 Time machine in place of those old tape echoes) and I'm wondering how to combine this stuff with the vocabulary of techniques I learned in the jazz world. I did study one non-western tradition for a while, three years of the chinese pipa, but it was all classical-based, I'm not really sure what kind of improvising tradition there is with that instrument but my teacher, bless her, wants nothing to do with it. There is an improvising pipa player in NYC that's worked with Derek Bailey but I think she's an anomaly rather than the norm among pipa players. I know there's a pretty rich history of improvising in Arabic music and I just tried out this electric oud at the NAMM show that knocked my socks off, the guy that makes 'em is fairly local and gives lessons, so my mind's beginning to reel again... Where do I expect to end up from any of this? Beats me. To directly answer the initial question, there was no epiphanous moment when I realized I dug looping the same way I realized I'm an improvisor. To me looping in and of itself is about as intrinsically interesting as slide guitar, a minor 9th chord, soaring feedback or rhythm changes, in other words it's what you do with it. Others feel the same way about improvising. To each his or her own. I mostly lurk here for that reason, looking for the odd tip here or there. Ken R