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Looper's Delight
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>Drummers are harder to deal with in this respect, as they are used to
being
>the band metronome, but I've even met kit players who can follow a loop... With my band, I feel we've made a transformation over the course of a year
or so, from the point of realizing that a purely intuitive approach would not
quite work in situations where the loop, once established, needs to direct the
tempo (but fails). The change (gradual, required lots of practice, argument,
frustration) had more to do with conscious realization as to where each band
member directs their mental focus for obtaining the pulse. Normally, this is the
drummer (for all, including the drummer) - and it was only logical to expect the
drummer to have the most difficulty in tuning into an extraneous source for
tempo - AND do this dynamically, I.e., only at the when such a tempo-dictating
loop is in fact running.
Over a year or so, we feel we have it at the point that this focus
switching occurs quite naturally, and moreover start becoming somewhat
successful at playing to the loop in such a way that it sounds natural (by
pulling/pushing on the rhythm and tempo deliberately) rather than slavishly and
robotically obey its dictated pulse. It's exciting to play with the idea that
there's an infinite number of ways to be 'in lock' with a loop (the results
varying from awful to quite wonderful)
I guess my point is, our choice has been to spend significant time and
effort in learning how to play to tempo-fixed loops, rather than invest effort
and technology into how to manipulate them on the fly into submission to our
own, imperfect time. In conjunction with this we made the choice to not 'can',
but always establish the loop live - in this way, we have a natural initial
tempo upon which the loop is built, and are able to keep things a little more
dynamic and risky than with a canned loop.
The hardest are loops established for a limited amount of time at the
beginning of a song, that only reappear much later in the song again. Once
you're 'unlocked', it's amazing how much one (or all, if in a band) can drift
while in the conviction that you're not. I imagine we'll have that down one day,
too.
Nic
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