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Looper's Delight
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Ok gang (o' mine)...I am back from semi-lurker mode (it's beena busy and hectic summer; I have been reading the posts but have not had the time nor energy to chime in....until now..) Of late there have been some VERY interesting threads on a number of subjects (methinks Rick may have stumbled into a sort of philosophical epiphany for which he is eager for all of us to indulge in/with)...and this latest thread on organic looping is most interestinga nd inspiring. I try to keep all my looping as organic as I can; that is the main concept in my performance. All the sounds I make are generated by the bass guitar and I use very little (in fact just a touch of reverb, if any) processing and electronic augmentation to achieve this. I have found ways to use the bass and my hands to create effects similar to the electronic effects of flanging,phasing, chorus-ing even ring modulating...I guess that keeps things pretty organic (creating delay effects are tricky, but not all that difficult using loops and playing to them in "alterered rhythms"). I also try to keep the loopage and the playing interactive. That is to say, i try to smear the lines of distinctioin between what is being played and what is being looped. This helps to avoid the pitfall of create a mindlessly static repetitious event while maintaining a level of repetition and , in fact, generating a level of "play" within that repetition. This achieved thru various levels of undo, replace, mute and fades (in and out) of the looped material (BTW: I am still using only me trusty ol' JamMan with upgraded OS chip by Bob Sellon, which allows for a number of new functions to this old beast). One trick I have been playing with quite is bit is a method of manual randomization. For instance, in the course of a perfromed piece, either "composed" or improvised, I might play a motif, and eventually loop all or part of it and in real time begin playing a harmony line to it. Rather than simply "overdub" this new material to the loop, I will tap the record button (I am using two Digitech FS300 footswitches rather than any MIDI control the JamBoy) multiiple times in a rhythmic cadence to the looped material. This, in essence, turns the record/overdub function on and off rapidly in time with the music, and produces a somewhat randomized "print" of the melody I have been playing. If the melody is fast, I might tap in half time, on downbeats or off beats; if the melody is slow I might tap in double time or in a triplet rhythm (often varying the "engage/disengage" beat of the tap so the triplets "roll" in a more randomized fashion). Thanks to Rick's influence, I have lately been using this techique by tapping the record/pause fuction in a cascara rhythm and varying styles of claves....often mixing these rhythmic taps in the course of creating an "overdub". And, quite often when doing this, I ignore the loop start/end and let this "randomizing" bleed over mulitple layers of the loop. And often, in pre-meditation of using this technique, I will conceptualize the overdubed melody to be two or three times longer than the original loop...or some times 2.5 times longer. The idea here is not to just to toss in sounds pell mell and make an audio "splatter", but rather to have some concept(and control) of how to quasi-randomly extract various notes from a played melody, as it is being played, to create a new melodic motif, harmonic focus, and rhythmic concept to a looped performance. I originally began doing this with the JamMan in an effort to create some of the organized glitchines which Andre LaFosse so excels at, but found this technique works very well in injecting some abstraction into a more "ordered" compostion (and doing this in multi-layers of overdub sometimes reaveals the most beautiful "accidental" melodies and sounds.) Ok, so there's no special software pgms, no high-dollar extaneous out-board electronic mojo....just a rather simple technique using practical knowledge of looping, rhythm, and musical composition in a most organic way.... Max