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Looper's Delight
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Hi All...I have been away for a few days, and now have had the tenuous joy of going thru this rather intensive thread on drum machines vs. humanity and some rather clever tricks to "personalise" drum machine loops. I have had a good deal of experience with the public "distrust" of mechanized rhythms. When I began doing looping shows I was quite into the one man band aspect of things; I had set up a hefty pedalboard (at one time 17 pedals!) and rack mount processing in front of the looper, and tended to process each OD'd pass to the extreme. To add to this, I would midi-sync a drum machine, mostly so that while using a JamMan I could move to seperate loops whilst staying in sync. The drum Machine, would sometimes have multiple pattern which would be footswitched for different feels or "song" sections. All in all I was fairly pleased with stuff I had worked out in the privacy of my own home....but, once I strated playing out I realized there might be a problem "communicating" using this sort of technology. For solo bass stuff (sans drum machines), no matter how heavily processed, looped or "outside" the music was, the audience was mostly rapt with attention. The whole concept of real-time loops was generally accepted, with a certain level of mystery, with amazement. Yet, the minute the drum machines came on 70% of the audience was lost. Many would just get up and leave. Such was the general reaction to "sequenced parts" and "canned" drum machine sounds. Well, I explained this dilemma to the most knowledable Rick Walker, who suggested I stop using programmed drum sequences, and instead actually play the drum machine; bulding the drum loop from scratch for the audience to witness. Hey, this worked, sort of. It seems most audience NEED the entertainment factor of watching a musician do his/her thing....and programming a drum machine in real timne did fill that void. Of course, to some watching someone hunker over a tiny SR16 is not too terribly entertaining...something like a Kat or Octapad would very useful in that sort of setup. The other problem was the sounds which most drum machines have. This dilemma had been addressed on this thread (flanger, phasing,EQ etc) but one thing I found was to use two drum machines. One programmed with the "beats" and one with several "common feels" which could just percussive voices, or detuned drum sounds which could be triggered, mixed, and sync'd via midi. This proved to give a very 3 dimensional sound to the sometimes static drum machine loops. If you run to a mixer, try running the drums in stereo and inverting the phase on one side...this works some subtle magic also. Yet..to wrap this up, I have since given up the drum machines, and now (for the past year of so) have been exploring playing percussive parts on my bass (a semi-acoustic Godin) via string mutes, dampening, rapping sections of the body or neck...and of course the infamous aligator clips. I am able to very deep, rich and polyrhythmical parts...even killing off one sewction and rebuilding. Now, hearing about LoopIV makes this technique and an EDP so promising!!!(the influence of Mr. LaFosse!!) If I need "drum sounds" I use Fruity Loops and burn parts to a CD and then loop a section of that to initiate a real-time looping performance (usually I prefer using the bass, tho). One last thing.....I have also recently switched my processing around now favoring putting fx (which is now pretty much down to an M-One and parametric eq) AFTER my looper; insuch processing the loops instead of looping the fx. Using timed delays, and detuned delays, this creates some very interesting polyrhytms whic can be "undone" by simply switching back to the original fx program (or to an different one). Just curious about how many of you are setting up fx and loop mangling.... sorry about the length.... Max _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.