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Looper's Delight
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Kim Flint wrote: > >And who tends to come to mind when the idea of a looper comes up? > >People like Robert Fripp and David Torn. Why? Because they've got the > >most high profile of any "loopists" I can think of. > > *For You!* For a lot of people, it's totally different! That's the whole > point of this discussion. Looping is a varied, fragmented thing, with > numerous lines of development. I don't think any one of them has some >right > to claim itself as the true looping lineage and deny all the others. Its > absurd! Looks like it's my turn to not be getting my point across! Rest assured, Kim, I'm not some hardcore Frippophile who wakes up in the morning and listens to his Soundscapes CD collection in sequential order whilst accessing the aphorism generator at the DGM website before practicing angular odd-metered picking exercises in the New Standard Tuning. I'm *not* saying that Fripp is the True Looping Lineage. I'm talking about public perception of a very particular type of looping that not a lot of people are associated with. If somebody walks on stage in public and starts doing real-time looping with some sort of dedicated looper or delay line (or reel-to-reel tape loop, for that matter), using some instrument as a source sound, I would dare say that for those people who have some prior reference point for what's going on, that Fripp is going to be one of the first people to come to mind, because of the methodology of that particular approach. I'm not talking about ReBirth-style "real-time" data entry, I'm talking about recording and looping a sound right then and there. I remember loaning an old Alesis Quadraverb to a cellist, who stumbled across a very ordinary delay patch which compelled him to remark that he'd love to experiment with my "Frippertronics" patch. The Electro-Harmonix 16-second delay used to be advertised as a "Fripp-in-a-box." And there's actually a patch on at least one model of the Eventide Harmonizer called (you guessed it) "Frippertronics." It's a fairly long mono delay line with high feedback. Let me ask you this: How many non-guitarists can you think of who have a visible public profile in live, real-time looping, in the sort of way that involves an EDP or Boomarang or JamMan or some such similar device? (Again, I'm not talking about a ReBirth type of live programming/electronic synthesis or sample playback device, which is a completely different breed altogether). How many of them have been doing it as long as Fripp, in as many different sorts of live situations as he has? I've got to underscore this: I'm *not* talking about the actual musical content or value of what he does. I'm talking about what leads people to make this connection between real-time looping and guitar playing. These aren't my own, personal value judgements. They're my observations on what sorts of things tend to foster certain public perceptions. > For instance, Fripp sets his different > delay lines to specific mathematical ratios with the intent of creating > evolving textures that repeat in a long, yet specific amount of time. I > don't know what the numerical significance is to him (if any) but it >seems > like he often uses prime number ratios, like 31:7 or something. Now how >is > it that I know that and none of you Fripp fans ever brought it up? jeez. Maybe it's because this sort of info is far from common knowledge. I've read many, many interviews with Fripp, including several where he talks about his looping approach. He tends to go on in depth about various intellectual and philosophical postulations, but very rarely, if ever, delves into concrete technical information. If this is information you got from him when you met him during your G-WIZ tenure, then take some satisfaction in having been privy to some pretty rare information, and please try not to get irate with us ordinary folk over the fact that not all of us are granted the chance to talk to famous loopists on that sort of in-depth basis. If it's info you gleaned somewhere else, then you either stumbled into a very obscure source of information, or else the rest of us are even more dense and clueless than we'd thought. Let's hope it's not that last one... -Andre