Re: real time groove loops

[Andre LaFosse <altruist@earthlink.net>]

> At 02:37 PM 2/6/98 -0500, John Price wrote:
> >Here goes again:
> >
> >There has to be a more hands on way to build non rhythmic samples and
> >static-non-pre - looped preset tones into full blown grooves that are
> >triggered all live and in real time with perfect synchronization
> >from scratch.
> >I'm convinced that there's gotta be a way to make MIDI and groove
> >based music through clever looping live. It would put a little more
> >of chaos and real time interaction with the technology into the
> >picture and possibly add more color and diversity to clubland.

The Echoplex is great for this.  If you use the multiply and insert
functions, you can get perfectly quantized cut-and-paste textures
happening in real time with nothing "recorded" before the fact.  You can
quantize the multiples of the loop within the unit, or sync to an
outside source like a sequencer or drum machine.  As far as I'm
concerned it's one of the most powerful and revolutionary features in
the unit.

One thing I've been doing lately is synchronizing a hard disc recorder
so that it sends MIDI clock into the Echoplex, which then sends an audio
signal back to the recorder.  I then improvise some loops onto disk,
using the quantize and multiply/insert functions.  Once I've recorded a
few minutes' worth of material, I go back and select the best bits from
the improv, which are then looped within the recorder along a given
track.  The same basic thing could be done live, especially using MIDI
sync.

Kim said:
> A lot of electronic music has exciting, complex, danceable grooves, and
> creating it by carefully entering things into a sequencer program on a
> computer just feels totally wrong. 

Funny, for me it makes perfect sense.  I never use a sequencer program
on a computer to buukd grooves, though.  I use an old Roland TR-626,
which has a built-in step time programmer, which I use to trigger
percussion (or non-percussion) samples.  You can loop a bar over and
over, and add one drum sound at a time on a visual grid, so you hear the
pattern building as you go.  I create patterns on this and then transfer
them onto the computer.  It's the only way I could see doing it; there's
no way I could come up with decent patterns entering them one-by-one in
step time on a screen, or manually via keys on a keyboard.

> You should be able to jump around and be
> physically active and involved in creating it, in real time. 

I've actually seen quite a bit of footage of live techno shows where the
guys are hopping up and down on stage -- which is pretty funny, because
the only performance thing they're doing is hitting the "next pattern"
button on their sequencer.  Not quite the same thing, though.

> With something
> like drum and bass, which really lends itself to a jazz perspective of
> improvisation and rhythmic complexity, this seems to become even more > 
>true.

I just don't think it's possible, in my opinion.  A big part of the
sound of jungle to my ears is the fact that you're getting very choppy,
angular breaks in the sound, which stem from the ambience of the source
sound being cut up into different subsections, or from the distinct sort
of precision that comes from electronically triggering sampled sounds at
high speeds.  Those sorts of phenomena just don't exist in nature.  

I like quite a bit of the much-balleyhooed Roni Size album, which mixes
live rhythm sections with electronics in a d&b context, but a lot of the
rhythms just don't grab me because the "real" drummers I've heard trying
to play d&b grooves on that and other projects just don't (and, I would
venture to suggest, very likely *couldn't*) have the characteristic
supple-yet-ultra-precise sound that I'm always looking for in that
music.  I think this is one of the reasons there's so much hubbub over
d&b: It represents a new level of intricacy and complexity being brought
to what is often a characteristically rigid genre, and it's happening on
the technology's own terms, to come up with things that someone behind
an acoustic drum kit can't really play.

> I've been playing around with ideas like pre-composing rhythm fragments, 
>and
> using them in real time. it's ok, sort of like having to communicate with
> predefined sentence fragments rather than being able to construct them on
> the fly. 

I did a couple of jungle remixes with a fellow musician, which consisted
of doing this sort of thing live to tape.  I set up several different
channels of drum loops on a multitrack hard disk recorder, and then we
improvised the mix, bringing different combinations in and out of the
mix by muting or unmuting channels of loops.  Listening back to some of
those mixes, there are some interesting combinations of parts that I
wouldn't have thought of if I were piecing it together.  But I don't
know that I'd say the mixes have all that "live" of a feel (although, at
189 and 204 BPM, respectively, they're not exactly insomnia-curing).

> Still, the tools just ain't happening yet, at least in the 
> "instrument"
> sense. room for innovation.....

It would be great to see something like that come to pass, but I just
don't see how it's fundamentally possible, any more than it would be
possible, say, for Enya to do a live rendition of her hundreds of
multitracked vocal parts.  It's the age-old live-vs.-studio debate.  So
much modern dance music is an inherently studio-based thing, and I do
think there's a limit as to how much of that side of things can
realistically be transferred into the spontaneous, live realm.  For me,
that's one of the interesting dualities of the music: that something so
energetic and lively can be produced by a method so deliberate and
painstaking.

--Andre