Re: "Live Looping"

[Per Boysen <per@boysen.se>]

On 04-04-13 03.15,  "Tom Rex" <tomrex1@cox.net> wrote:

  
> The one skill I don't have is engineering, so I'm sort of slow on the
> technical end.  And that's where some of you have an advantage over just
> being a musician.  Sometimes, I feel that makes the difference to 
>belonging
> to the in group, vs. just being on the list.  I don't know.  What do the
> rest of you feel about this?


I too was initially only interested in the musician side. Once upon a time
(he, he...) I avoided anything related to musical engineering. I just
regarded it "so boring" compared to being a musician and improvise in a
group setting. Although I was quite good at setting an amp for "the right
guitar sound" I didn't even notice the difference in copying cassette tapes
with or without Dolby C noise suppression. At one occasion I producer got
really mad at me for this, since my ignorance did made his engineering work
look bad in public. This incidence made me start thinking about
"frequencies" as well as the ordinary musical expressions. I bought a
cassette porta studio (this happened in the early eighties) and started
learning to combine frequencies to fill up the spectrum that we as humans
are able to hear. And I found that "painting with frequencies" is not very
different from painting with melodies, sound shaping or musical performance
attitude, which are the parameters you learn to use in group improvisation.

And for the patching stuff - like inserting effects, effect aux sends etc
etc - you just have to get a book and read it once. It's very simple. It's
also valuable to put some time into experimenting and experience the
difference in, as an example, putting a reverb before or after a compressor
in an effect chain.

But working with electronics is really a lot more difficult than "mastering
an instrument", being a musician. A flute is always a flute and even if you
do not play especially well it may sound good in an ensemble situation, 
only
because "it is a flute and this music is very nice on the flute". With
electronics there are no rules. There is only the sound and that is what 
you
and everybody hear. When I came into electronics, from a musician
background, I found that electronics are in fact what I have been trying so
hard (mostly failing) to achieve on different instruments: Creating sound
that has a contextual meaning without falling into any tradition. Almost
impossible as a traditional instrumentalist ;-)

There are of course fashions and traditions even in electronic sound and 
its
application in music making, but that's another story...

Best wishes

Per Boysen
-- 
www.boysen.se
www.looproom.com