Loop strategies

["William R. Walker," <chillyb@cruzio.com>]

About a year ago I was working on a solo CD by my good friend George Perry.
George is a brilliant musician and writer who always challenges me in
creative ways. On one particular tune, he wanted a chorus of laughing
guitars. We decided to eschew the traditional use of a wah pedal, and got
creative with a jamman. We realized that laughter has an almost saw
tooth-like wave characteristic with a short rise and rapid fall time. To
mimic his particular laughter I first sampled a bit of his laughter into
the jamman. I then reversed the track, and proceeded to learn the cadence
of his laughter played backwards. Then I did my best to duplicate this
cadence on guitar, and the final step was to record and reverse the guitar
track so as to mimic not only the direction of his laughter, but also the
sawtooth-like characteristic of his laughter. We did this a half dozen
times on different guitars (baritone, strat, and mini strat) to create a
chorus of laughing guitars. The results were quite remarkable and
hysterically funny. It almost sounded like the canned laughter you would
hear on old tv sitcoms. The idea came from an attempt I made to create an
answering machine message where I learned how to phonetically say the
message in reverse and then flipped it over. ie. Hello my name is Bill
pronounced: lliB si eman ym olleH. If I'm not mistaken I believe David
Lynch used this same technique for the midget's voice on Twin Peaks.
Bill