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Looper's Delight
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At 2:51 PM -0800 12/14/01, Rick Walker (loop.pool) wrote: >How about a FIRST LOOOPING MEMORIES THREAD? To put this time line in perspective, I was born in 1946, started elementary school in 1950, and graduated high school in 1963: Long before I ever became aware of looping per se as musical process, I had a fondness for "weird" science fiction movie music and novelty sound effects. I was a regular listener to the Big John and Sparky radio program (1950-58), wherein Sparky's voice was a sped-up recording, and marveled at the sounds of theremin and homebrew electronics in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956). The first time I ever saw someone demonstrate double tracking was on the Walt Disney TV show, circa 1955. Peggy Lee did the voices of the two Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. Around this same time I used to hear Les Paul and Mary Ford's jingles for Robert Hall clothes on the radio. Lots of multitracking and tape-speed manipulation. When "The Witch Doctor" came out in 1958 I became a big fan of David Saville, and after he released the "Chipmunk Song" later that year my friends and I started playing around with tape recorders to imitate chipmunk voices. But this was just a lot of fooling around; my only real musical activity from childhood through high school was as a singer. It wasn't until my late teens that I got serious. In 1965 I got psychedelicized, both chemically and intellectually, and in 1966 I started playing quasi-professionally in a band. Although the band itself was strictly folk rock/psychedelic with guitars (a little banjo), bass, drums, and vocals, my listening went far beyond. During 1966-67 I rapidly got an education about electronic music, musique concrete, and live electroacoustic music. Pieces that were essential to this education were Steve Reich's "Come Out" (1966), Pauline Oliveros's "I of IV" (1967), Luciano Berio's "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" (1958). In 1969 I saw/heard John Cage and David Tudor perform with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and I composed my first multimedia piece for film with four spatially-separated tapes of manipulated sounds. I followed this with a film for three synchronized films, an adaptation of an Ionesco play called "Salutation" for three actors. Many of the techniques and compositional structures in this film were related to musical loop processes, i.e. layering, repetition, multiple perspectives on the same material. After a few years playing more straight-ahead rock music and making more straight-ahead films I found myself in Santa Cruz in 1975 and enrolled in Cabrillo College, where the music department had a New Music Ensemble and an Audio Arts program directed by Bob Beede. Bob had a Buchla Music Easel, and I started performing with him and a few others. A lot of what we played was improvised "pattern music," inspired by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and other so-called "minimalists." Our typical setup used a delay system made of two 4-track reel-to-reel decks with the tape treaded between them. As I recall, we didn't normally use regeneration on the signal path, so the effect was mainly a straight canonic repetition with only a small amount of feedback due to bleed into the microphones. Having four tracks of tape allowed us to have individual delays routed to their own speakers in a quad sound system. On one piece we had short delays from two playback heads of Machine #1 in the front channels and long delays from Machine #2 in the rear channels. I moved to San Diego in 1977 to attend graduate school, and for two years I lived with Paul Dresher. Paul was very much into tape delay systems at the time. At home he would play guitar through a funky system in his bedroom, using a couple of cheap old tape decks, but in the tape studio at school he was using the half-inch 4-track (with erase head defeated) for some serious loopage. These experiments led to the design of his 4-track performance looper, based on a modified TASCAM 40-4 deck and a voltage controlled matrix mixer. A pair of long metal arms supported a 20-30" tape loop, and in addition to the stock Record and Playback heads, the tape deck had and additional Playback head mounted at the halfway point in the loop. The outputs and feedback paths from each of the three heads could be controlled through the VCA mixer by means of a set of 24 foot pedals, and the signal routing was done manually with push buttons. This system was built in collaboration with music department technician (and guitarist) Paul Tydelski. It is the system Bill Walker referred to at the Kuumbwa gig in 1984. Partly because Paul was becoming such an obvious master at tape-based looping, I followed different avenues. I spent a lot of hours working with the school's Buchla 100 Series modular system, which had four analog step sequencers. I also did a lot of work with tape loops as part of some of my tape pieces, but most of the time this was used to prolong individual transient sounds from percussion instruments and the like. I also used some loops in the backing tape for the Diamanda Galas piece "Panoptikon" (1982), turning the sound of her ring modulated voice into a huge chugging engine from hell. -- ______________________________________________________________ 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