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Doctor, sir, you are appallingly well connected! 1:07 PM Richard Zvonar >At 7:12 AM -0700 4/29/02, Evan Meyers wrote: > >>does anyone know specifically if zappa ever really experimented with >looping > >I asked Bob Rice, who was Zappa's Synclavier assistant for several >years. Bob sez: > >>yes, actually. During the sound checks for his live shows, he used to >send >>everyone away and he'd just work with his guitar rig for a while at >>extremely high volume levels, mostly just improvising stuff. He'd load >>snippets into a pair of MXR digital delays with extended memory of up >to, I >>think, almost 4 seconds! Anyway, on the MXRs, he' d usually create 2 >>different loops so if they played together they'd eventually drop out of >>sync. This was the only use for the delays in the rig and they'd have 2 >>dedicated combo amps that were mic'd so that he could kick them in in the >>middle of a solo and then play over the top of them with his main rig. >The >>drummer and bass player would have to find a groove based on or around >the >>loops and if both were on and they went out of sync, they would listen >for >>the polyrhythms that would result from the kaos. For a short amount of >loop >>time, there were pretty amazing possibilities for improvisation with good >>players aboard. >> >>There is a live album called Make a Jazz Noise Here that has 2 pieces >that >>use quite a bit of looping. One is called Fire and Chains which uses a >>massive sample patch I built for him on the Synclavier with lots of vocal >>samples from the Senate hearings on Porn Rock lyrics (and warning labels >on >>records ect.), that loop around at various rates and have pitch >modulation >>patched to the polyphonic aftertouch on the keyboard. You'd hold down a >>chord and use varying degrees of aftertouch on each note to change the >>speed of the samples going round and round. Again these mutant >polyrhythms >>would result and you could play off of them if you could feel them. >> >>The guitar loops with the MXR delays happened at least once everynight >and >>an example of that is on the cut (also on Jazz Noise) called Star Wars >>Won't Work. There's also a pretty good helping of these delay solos on >the >>"Guitar" album (2 cds of Zappa guitar solos! NOt a desert island disc but >>interesting in small doses). > >-- > >______________________________________________________________ >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 >