Support
Looper's Delight
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At 3:54 PM -0500 9/4/01, M. Steven Ginn wrote: >How should I analyze how I want to manipulate my sounds? How do I learn >so I can better understand the musical implications of series/parallel >and pre/post faders? This is an important question with many possible answers. There are two points to my suggestion ( "You need to analyze how you want to manipulate your sounds and you need to understand the musical implications of series/parallel and pre/post"): The first point is that it can be helpful to examine the music you are making and the music you admire, and try to understand what it is about these musics that you like and that you want to do more of. Looping is not just one thing; there are many different musical styles and many different technical approaches. Which is/are yours? Are you interested in creating a sense of several musicians playing together by layering recognizable musical parts, or are you interested in creating a more disembodies wash of sound with subtly evolving timbral changes. Each of these approaches (and others one might describe) may best be served by a different setup. This brings us to the second point, achieving a technical understanding of the tools at your disposal. Experience is always the best teacher, and one thing you can do is to maximize the number and variety of your experiences. One way to do this is to forget for a moment the idea of hooking everything up together and to explore single devices and single techniques. For instance, you can take two effects processors and hook them up in different ways, exploring the implications of the different configurations. You might do this without a mixer at first, just by using patch cords. After a while you can add more elements to the system and explore the mixer's possibilities. One thing I like to do is to split signals and to bring them in on two or more channels of the mixer. This is especially effective if the mixer has bus assignment buttons. For instance, you could bring your source mix in on two channels. The first would assign the dry signal to the output mix; the second would feed the effects via aux sends but wouldn't feed any of the input to the mix. That way you'd have independent control over the level of your dry sound and of the effects send, on two faders side by side. Similarly, you can bring the outputs of the effects devices into the mixer on regular input channels (as opposed to effects returns). For instance, you could split the delay output and send one leg to the reverb while the other comes into the mixer. Then you could bring the reverb output into another input. This would give you the ability to mix the proportion of "dry" delayed signal and reverberant signal. >I have Craig Anderton's book Craig has been working with musical electronics since the 1960s. He knows his stuff and writes well about it. >I understand at a basic level things like delay should come before reverb >and compression should usually be first in the signal chain as well. Most of the time those are good rules of thumb, but sometimes you can achieve interesting things by defying convention. What if you put the compressor after the reverb and then send the reverb through a multitap delay with ping-pong pan effects? -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz