Re: Live Looping Techniques

[Tim Nelson <psychle62@yahoo.com>]

--- Terry Blankenship <electricgypsys@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> I was curious if any of you doing live looping gigs
> ever start with a series of already pre-recorded
> basic loops, or do you create everything on the
spot.

I do use some pre-recorded material, but not in the
sense of a prepared, static, fixed backing track. My
rack has a couple of minidisc decks in it that use as
samplers; I load 'em up with short loops of field
recordings, shortwave radio sounds, snippets of
instruments I play but don't take to gigs, old radio
commercials, pads, etc. (but I steer clear of stuff
that sounds 'pre-played'; it's not melodic content or
chord progressions, I do that part live.) I can fade
this content in (through live post-processing) along
with whatever instrument I'm playing and catch it as
an ingredient in a "live loop". It's not the same as
just pressing play, though; while normally samplers
are played like a keyboard instrument, my 'playable
interface' for the pre-recorded content consists more
of real-time pitchshifting and tweaking of held
delays. It can't be done exactly the same way twice. I
also have microcassettes of similar material that I
can play through my pickups to toss into the loop.

Ironically, even though one of my loopers is an RC-20,
I've never felt the slightest desire to use the
'storage locations', but do everything in real time.

-t-

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