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Looper's Delight
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On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 09:07 AM, Jim Palmer wrote: > > looping devices allow for some editing during improv. > so i guess they can take the place of paper memory? Right! I tried to talk about this last time we had a thread, and a bunch of people got irate when I suggested that what we call "Looping" has advanced in many ways beyond the word's initial meaning and maybe the term has outgrown its use. I shit in half the time now, as I was torn a new asshole. To use a looper is to use external memory, no matter how you slice it. Like all machines Loopers extend our capabilities. When you have a tape loop, you have a pretty simple affair. Out more or less equals what you put in, plus time. However, the EDP (especially) has become so much more. It an behave like a tape loop, but in the hands of some people it becomes more akin to live audio editing. When I first saw a real DJ play up close (DJ Spooky), the first thing that came to my mind was how similar what we were doing really was. The only difference was that his raw material was vinyl and mine was the output of my instrument. What I'd really love is for someone to manufacture a device like the Pioneer CDJ-1000 that would let you use live input instead of a CD as the audio source. Seems totally possible, no? The CDJ-1000 takes data from an optical drive and puts it in a RAM buffer. Why not fill that ram buffer from the output of an A/D converter? Anyway, it doesn't exist...yet. I can kind of get similar stuff from my KAOSS pad and AirFX, but it's not quite the same. So... where does it go from looping to live audio production? In my brain, I see what most of us doing as live audio production that happens to use loopers. Similar in a way that we can say heavy metal is a type of music that happens to mostly use guitars and drums. Does all music that uses guitar and drums equal heavy metal? Of course not. That's why I disagree with the people who feel that "looping" (or whatever term floats your boat) is a genera of music. To me it's like saying people who use Digital Performer play a genera of music. Silly. Having said all this, I'm fine with calling what I (and we) do as "looping." Why? Because, in marketing terms, it's got a lot of good qualities. Short, fun to say, looks good in a logo. Has some popular definition that suggests repetition. Also, if I say I do, "Live audio production" that sounds DRY as hell. When I get an odd look after having said, "Looping" I usually follow it up with, "...it's kind of like what a DJ does with vinyl records, except the music doesn't come from vinyl, I'm playing it live." This seems to satisfy most people, even though it's not a great explanation. Vinyl is a type of machine memory, and so is the Smartmedia card in my Repeater. Good enough for me. Most people at this point are somewhat familiar with the term DJ, so even though I'm not really a DJ, it's a good term to latch on to. Where I go from there is up to me. Mark Sottilaro