Re: loop device endorsement - was Santanas looping bassist

["Bruce Comens" <bcomens@mail.nexus.it>]

> but doesnt it take another sticker to start with? One that sais something
like:
> "I compose live with looping"
>
> How many of the musicians that go to the Santana concert know that
> what happens in the bass solo is called looping?

Yes, visibility is a real problem.  There's a big difference  between 
famous
guitarist X who's holding the thing in his arms while on stage and some
little box tucked away in a rack and being operated, usually unobtrusively,
by a footpedal.

2 examples of invisibility:
Earlier in the summer I saw Eivind Aarset in concert, and he used a lot of
looping.  You couldn't see a looper, though, and I doubt if anyone in the
audience realized that was going on, since it was very much a part of his
heavy processing.  I went up to stage later and saw an edp in his rack.
Then I saw Garbarek; during Eberhard Weber's extended bass solo he use very
clear (simple but very effective) looping, but while I'm sure the muscians
realized he wasn't doing playing everything at once, I suspect the rest of
the audience just saw him playing his bass.  I guess he was using an edp
too, but i don't know because i couldn't see any rack, or even his
footpedals.

1 example of visibility.
One thing the folks at line 6 are very good at is marketing.  I don't think
they have any endorsers for the dl4, but they designed a very distinctive
cute/funky box that sits on the floor and is instantly recognizable.
(N.B.:  I'm NOT saying the edp should be like that!)    An Italian
disc-spinning show a while back featured a guest bassist whose whole act
featured that little green box:  him in an empty room with his electric 
bass
and the dl4 sitting all by itself on the floor.  He layered an impressive
funky wall of sound with it, dancing around while doing so.  I can imagine
people going to their music store and asking about the green box that 
allows
them to do that.
But I wonder how many of them ever discover that there are more 
possibilties
to looping than the dl4 offers?  That's one of the problems with 
technology,
that people often accept whatever is immediately available as the defining
condition (my students' web-based research comes to mind....)  One of the
things that makes the edp so wonderful is that you can change many of those
conditions (especially with loop4), which in sense means that you can
transform it into different instruments....

bruce