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Looper's Delight
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Hey Phil, loopers, Welcome to the week of first loop gigs :). I have a tale to tell of my own experience this past weekend Rick was in Belfast as part of his Eu tour, I had arranged a radio interview with the local BBC station and because Rick was delayed travelling from staying with Per in Sweden I was on my own in the studio with my DL-4 and a Ghanaian balafon. I did a casual looping sound check on the balafon which the engineer recorded and they played it as the opener to the interview, My first ever looping performance was on BBC radio followed by my first ever live performance in the same interview where I did a bit of impromptu water gargling which I used to demonstrate the simple functions of the DL-4. Rick joined us on the phone from his ferry terminal in Scotland and arrived with me a few hours later than that. The radio interview is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/realmedia/arts_x_thu.ram it will be there until Thursday and the portion is at about 24 minutes into the show. They cut off the gargling for some reason, space I presume. We did the performance on Friday evening, two solo sets, some duets plus a combined set with a friend on Contra-alto clarinet. Up to this weekend I had only ever looped at home by way of practise and familiarisation. I'm a percussionist so I worked with open mics and wore cans most of the time for (everyone else's) convenience. I had been working through my studio system which seemed to work fine and I could set everything for a decent volume without feedback (of the larcene variety). I'm using a single DL-4 on an aux channel from my desk so I had individual control over the mic and looped signals I opened the gig by explaining a little about looping in simple terms, with a couple of demonstrations by looping what I was saying. That seemed to go well. Once I started into my set however the feedback started. I had control over my desk with my left hand so I was straight on it and dropped the DL-4 level to kill the feedback which by this stage had gotten into my loop :) It worked within the loop so I was able to lift the volume again and continue. The feedback was an irregular but present feature of the performance overall, it only really squealed in one place, mostly it was a slight ringing or tone. Speaking with Rick afterwards I found out it was in part due to was due to my 'tweez' being at 12 O'clock causing some form of internal feedback rather than mic/speaker feedback. I found left handed feedback surfing whilst struggling to maintain sufficient volume, lifting and replacing noise items, being creative musically and having to juggle the pedal control all quite a handful. Boy did it ever feel hot in there :) I had started off with no headphones but because the volume of the loops were so low in my anti-feedback crusade, I had to wear them pretty much full time. My first piece was a solo piece for Balafon which faded into a piece for Tar (Mid Eastern frame drum) feedback :), chinese cymbal and threaded bar cutting to a duet for caxixi (Brasilian basket shaker) and 2 litre plastic cola bottles, one of which has a tyre valve attached and was pumped up to give a high ringing note. I tried to start a 'house' groove, using a foot stomp for the kick and the ssshhh of the tyre valve release as the hats - good idea but it didn't translate well because of the lack of volume. The second piece used whirlies, kalimba, chinese cymbal, a cordless drill and theremin. Unfortunately feedback forced me to drop the volume and wear headphones and it turned out disappointingly that FOH it was very quiet for the audience. I finished up doing a short solo on bodhran. Feedback (of the response kind) from the small but fascinated audience was that they enjoyed my performance but it was very quiet. My own internal audience in my head was going WTF! WTF! WTF! :) LOL Rick's set was awesome, he opened with a piece based on windchimes which he had borrowed from my house and then a beautiful bell piece followed by a piece for day-glo plastic 'robotic voice' toys with beatboxing and singing. I've never seen a performance with such sonic variety which is quite something for me to say as I pride myself on my eclectic approach to noise and its serviceability. I got on very well with Rick personally and musically, we found ourselves finishing off each other's musical sentences and when we dueted on drums you would have thought we had been playing together for years in spite of the fact that we had only jammed 2-3 minutes that afternoon. I'd encourage anyone to catch Rick's show on this tour, it's one of those musical oddities that you won't ever forget. Mark Buckingham joined us on Contra-Alto clarinet to finish off the evening, the first piece was Rick and I both looping and the second was a dark atmospheric piece with Mark playing and Rick mangling, I was playing bodhran and some texture looping. Everything was routed thru Rick's equipment so he was able to loop and mangle anything that either I or Mark were doing. I'm glad to have lost the looping cherry and it's funny how public embarrassment (of a sort) kind of focuses the mind on what should be done differently. After my own experiences and watching Rick, I now have a virtual set in my head of things that I could have done and approaches that I could have taken. I'm now very much looking forward to my next looping gig whenever that will be, I'll need an hour on stage to make sure that I have the technology and micing sorted and I can see the need for a second looper box of some sort so that I can work more than one loop simultaneously Oh yeah, if anyone from Line-6 is reading this, any chance of a separate button for reverse on the DL-4?, the glitch caused by double clicking which puts the loop out of time is really a pain in the ass, sometimes it gives interesting results but as a percussionist it's too random for me to rely on unless I stop and restart the loop. The 'one shot' button is rarely used in my case, is there any way this can be re-assigned? I consider myself well charred but fully baptised into the family of live performing loopers. An exceptionally worthwhile exercise in terms of putting on Ireland's first ever Live Looping performance, a money loser for me as a promoter but the investment in the art was well worthwhile IMO. It was great to meet Rick, a enigmatic and hugely creative individual, Chris is lovely and such a support for him!!. The invitation to the percussion day of the Y2K3 festival in CA in October festival makes me very happy if I can get the support of the British Council to attend and I look forward to meeting some fellow LD members there. Paul ---------------------- Paul Marshall Portfolio Sound Artist http://www.powerhaus.net http://www.drumdojo.com http://www.differentdrums.co.uk NI Facilitator for the Da Capo Foundation www.dacapo.co.uk Drumdojo Recommended link For June 2003 Percussion of Persia http://tinyurl.com/ddbg