Adrian Belew's Loops

[ld thomson <heatshrink@hotmail.com>]

I pulled this off the Adrian Belew web site, thought it might be of some 
interest to you all.

Q- So the sound inspires a musical counterpoint, as opposed to you writing 
a 
song and then searching for some sounds to make it work.

Belew - "Actually, I do both things. But it’s very convenient for me if, 
when I find a new sound, generally I’m playing something and think "This 
is 
cool, I ought to write a song with this." But if I’ve already written a 
song 
and I know I want to take the guitar in a certain direction, then I can 
sit 
down and design that sound for it.

Right now, I’m using a new amplifier called the Johnson Millennium. It has 
wonderful built-in effects, which are going to be very helpful for me to 
create the next generation of guitar sounds I’ll work from. A recent 
discovery that I made, which is really helping me a lot, is ways to use 
loops, which I comically call "Belewps." And the loops systems I’ve been 
doing have been ones that are not static. Normally you think of a loop and 
you play something into it and it plays that back internally. I’ve been 
trying to work with loops you can interact with—add to, interrupt, and 
constantly change—while you’re playing. This is all done with an 
expression 
pedal: Every time you bring the expression pedal in, you’re tapping into 
the 
loop, turning it on or off, or adding to it."

Q - Do you ever do something where you might use some kind of distortion 
or 
other modulation effects into the loop and play over the loop with a 
different kind of sound?

Belew - "That’s what I am doing. The Johnson Millennium comes with a 
pedalboard, and you can determine whether or nor something is being turned 
on or off by manner of a normal footswitch, by manner of a momentary 
switch, 
so that it’s just being turned on as you’re stepping on it, or by hooking 
it 
to an expression pedal. Now, the loop is already on the expression pedal. 
On 
the other footswitches, I usually have something like another delay, 
distortion, and perhaps a very interesting-sounding chorus. Because I’ve 
found it helps to separate. Once you have a loop you want to play 
something 
to, you can either sound like you’re doubling it, or you can play against 
it, almost like Robert Fripp and I play sometimes—the same lines a little 
out of synch with each other—or you can choose a sound that’s so different 
from it that it really does sound like two completely independent guitar 
players."


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