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Looper's Delight
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--- Mike Barrs <mbarrs@nightviewer.com> wrote: > Here are the two main hurdles, as I see it: > > 1) Many musicians aren't interested in free-form, solo performance, >ambient > style music. If you want to play with other musicians, a looper is a >barrier > because it's like playing to a click track... which everyone hates, >unless > they're another looping musician. Don't underestimate this. I occasionally play loops with other (non-looping) musicians. Some get into it, some don't. A good friend of mine (a bass player) absolutely loves to do free form stuff with me. To me, this just means you won't play loops with everyone you play music with. The ones that enjoy it will REALLY enjoy it. In the same sense that I wouldn't play lap steel in every group I play with, I don't use my looper every time I go out. > I almost bailed > out of looping, until I finally figured out that I could learn how to >stomp > on the pedal in time with the downbeat if I really worked at it. This is > something everyone here probably takes for granted, but it's an enormous > barrier for newcomers... especially those used to working with live > musicians where there is more live human interaction in tempo feel. You have a Repeater, which easily accomodates this. When you notice your loop drifting from the other musicians (shouldn't happen if they were listening to each other, but reality being what it is, and most musicians being what they are...), you just tap the corrected tempo into the Repeater and it'll fix it for you. You don't need to retrigger the start of the loop every bar or two. > 2) Someone like me who comes from a traditional music background (blues >and > jazz) automatically thinks in terms of traditional song structures like > A-A-B-A. How many people on this list have actually tried to loop a > traditional verse-verse-chorus-verse song? I'm not one, but there are several people here that have talked about doing that. I know John Mazzarella is one, you might check the archives for some of his posts. > I've been working at it for a > year, and it's frustrating. The Repeater fixes the bar length with the >first > recorded track, so forget an AABA song where the "B" section is a >different > number of bars, unless you want to get into a Midi pedal tap dancing > nightmare of arming and switching between loops. That's because they expect you to change loops, not tracks, when you move to another musical section. I haven't tried it, but you should be able to program a midi controller to switch to the next loop and start recording with one button press. The Repeater's loop switching latency may prevent that though, so what you might do is program one pedal to switch to the next loop (at loop end), then start recording in that loop when you get there. If that won't work for you, you might have to pre-record the loops in the lengths you're going to use beforehand. To do this, you'd tap in the tempo, record silence in loop1 for as long as you want, record silence in loop2 for as long as the next section, loop3, etc, THEN go back and start recording your music into the spaces you've created for it, switching loops where appropriate. OR do two or more sections together. For example, if you were doing a form ABAB, you'd record A and B together before ending the loop, or even the entire thing. The Repeater lends itself well to this approach because of the very long loop lengths it provides (up to 8 minutes per loop). >From what I've read, the EDP lends itself to this loop switching much >better then the Repeater, since you can switch loops directly into record with one press of a button (no midi required), and can alter the loop length on the fly while you're playing. > And then there is the > problem of the "crash to a singularity" when you've built up a looped "A" > section with bass, rhythm guitar and lead, and then suddenly move to >naked > guitar on the "B" section because it needs a new bass line and new rhythm > chords. If you're not working in the ambient soundscape style, you can't > hide these transitions with washes of delay and reverb tails. This is a different issue entirely, and not one exclusive to the Repeater. If you're doing all kinds of different parts and layering up a whole bunch of stuff before moving to the next section of the piece, you're always going to have problems like this. As someone else said, it would be easier to move through the different parts adding a layer at a time instead. That said, if you can get to a Phil Keaggy concert, this guy does this better then anyone I've ever seen. I don't really hear it on his recordings, but in concert he uses loops on every single song. And all he does are traditional song arrangements, no "washy ambient" material at all. He does the entire show solo, with a Lexicon Jamman and the loops come in and out all the time. It's pretty much seemless too. If you weren't watching him dance around on the footpedals, and hearing other parts coming and going when there's only one guy on the stage, you'd probably never know he was looping (ie, if you only heard the audio). It's really quite amazing, and it sounds like what he's doing exactly what you want to do. I saw him recently and noticed that he does things to compensate for the disappearance of the loop part as he's playing. For example, he'll make a dramatic creshendo and intentionally use the buildup and immediate stop in the music as part of his arrangement, or he'll play his guitar louder when stopping the loop so that the volume at the transition is similar. > To the extent that the Repeater (or any other looper) fits my style, I'll > use it. But I'm not going to warp my entire musical concept to fit what >the > box can do. A tool is a tool, and you can either use it to augment what you do, or augment what you do to use it. The choice is your's, but to say you won't adjust what you do to accomodate a different tool doesn't really allow you to fully utilize it. That applies to anything, from a new guitar (more pickups, more strings, different tuning) to a distortion box, to a complex effects unit, to a looper. That's not to say that it's bad. Some people make great music with just an acoustic guitar. Other's want to use the giant rack-o-fun. It's about using whatever helps you. > To be clear, I love my Repeater. I love it enough to have bought a second > one when I heard Electrix was going out of business, as a backup (that >funky > non-replaceable power supply scares me). But I don't see it as a tool >that > will instantly appeal to the vast majority of musicians, until the > capabilities of loopers (and especially, the user interface) go through a > few more product evolution cycles. There are a couple of ways of using loopers that would work for virtually any musician. I haven't seen any of the marketing for existing loopers exploit these things. One is as a practice tool. For example, if I'm working on a new song and am thinking about what guitar part I want to play, it's very convenient to play the chords for a section into my looper and then experiment playing parts over them as they loop. Sure, I could do the same thing with a 4tk, or a computer, or make another musician sit there and play the stuff while I mess around, but it's just SO fast and easy with the looper. About 15 seconds of setup time, immediate access. Very efficient. Another thing that loopers are particularly well suited to is making interesting music by yourself. There's a huge number of people out there who've gotten sick of "the band scene" and all the frustrations that go with that, but they still love music and want to do it. A looper allows a great way to have something to hear and react to while playing by yourself. I fall into that category myself. My family life, job, and schedule in general makes it hard to rehearse with other people very much. And frankly, I'm sick to death of trying to sort through a world of flakey musicians to find 3-4 that will even show up for a rehearsal without being a total jerk or leaving after a month of two. I just want to make some music, I'm tired of dealing with people's whacked out personalities and depending on people who are not reliable. Using a looper allows me to play, rehearse, or just mess around any time I have the time to do it. > P.S. this is all in the context of the Repeater... the only looper I > understand, and I'm still just a beginner. If the EDP does a better job >of > handling traditional AABA song formats, please let me know. You'll probably hear this more from the people using them, but from everything I can tell, the EDP IS more suited for that sort of thing. There are probably ways to make your Repeater do what you want too. Greg __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com