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Looper's Delight
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Luis Angulo wrote: "I am having fun doing this thing lately last night i played in konstanz laying layers of rhythms i also graved an old cookie tray from the bar for a snare sound(a la ricko suave) with different instruments and then playing guitar on top with really low open tunigs fro a bassier sound,i did a version of "Walk on the wild side" man you should have seen the peoples faces bro!a girl kept coming up every 5 min. trying to see what was behind the monitor and how i was doing it and i just cracked up:-))then i went on to explain how i was doing it and people seem fascinated by it." Wow, what a wonderful gig it sounds like, Luis. This is one of those times that I wish I had a lost rich uncle to leave me a million bucks so I could just drop everything and jet in and play with you as a duo at your next gig in Konstanz (for those of you unfamiliar with it, Konstanz is one of the most beautiful towns in Southern Germany...........truly beautiful and untouched by World War 11's bombings, but that's another longer story). "I am doing congas with a small kanjira it sounds great but i want to get a good hand snare drum and maybe a small cymbal, what can you recomend me as a drummer?" Evans, by the way, puts out a portable conga that is just a head on a rim. It sounds fantastic as a conga and is so low profile that it's easy to throw it into the back of a rack case or guitar bag. Another trick I use is to use a piece of enclosed tupperware with a pitch shifter. You can layer several 'conga' parts really quickly just by switching the pitch of the pitch shifter---I use the cheesy and wonderful Vocal 300 by Digitech). Viz a vis a snare drum there are several cool simulations you can use short of actually buying a snare drum (which can be bulky to carry). One I love is to take a string of really large fake pearls (I use dagylo lime green ones but that's just me.......lol) and put them inside of a small frisbee that is made of the more brittle kind of plastic (as opposed to more rubbery plastic). With both hands, throw the beads in the air and catch them in the frisbee (turned upside down) and , VOILA!!!!!, a great trashy, white noise hip hop snare sound............again with a pitch shifter you can run the gamut with such a thing. Any kind of material strung up: beads, rattles, metal beads, chain of different thicknesses, etc. when thrown on wood or metal or plastic objects will cause a 'snarey' kind of sound. Otherwise, I bought an 8" 1970's fiberglass pearl drum and put piccolo snare hardware on it; bought 8" snare heads (custom ordered) and drilled out the bottom rim to accomodate the snare strands and have a wonderful lo profile rap snare that can sound like heavy metal when tuned down and played through a pitch shifter (are you getting how much I depend on my vocal 300?). Cymbals are more problematic because they take up so much territory and they can be quite costly. One thing to be on the lookout for is really cheap used (and sometimes terrible sounding cymbals), particularly cymbals that were designed for small children's toy drum kits. With some simple DSP processing, some of these cymbals can really come alive in a looping situation. You can play them on the bell with the tip of a drum stick or the body or you can hit the side of the cymbal with the middle of the drumstick to create really different textures. The beauty of looping is that you can take a really cheesy inexpensive kids cymbal (even a broken one discarded and sold for very little at a flea market) and do one loop of one technique, layer a second loop of a second technique, etc. and come up with a fascinating and quite idiosyncratic rhythm track. One thing I love to do along these lines with my Repeater is to mallet a cymbal continuously on one of my loops and then take the volume down to nothing on that track. Using the volume on the Repeater with my left hand and keeping my right hand on the mute button on the returned channel on the mixer you can swell the volume up and mute it own the downbeat to create really cool and controllable backwards cymbal sounds. You can also take all the bass off the channel and boost the treble when doing this to get a SHHHHHHHH sound and then immediately pump the bass and boost the midrange to get a SHHHHUUUUUUUUUSHHHHHH sound. This is a fun trick during 'breakdowns' in a track. Also, lot's of metal objects can easily double for cymbal or bell sounds. Stainless Steel mixing bowls make awesome gong and sound fantastic when reversed, especially if you've hit the edge of the bowl hard with your thumb or a mallet or stick. If you take wire wisks, they frequently have hollow stainless steel handles which if hit with another metal object sounds very much like a triangle which you can then dampen at will. Again, this shit sounds fantastic reversed. Add different modulation effects and other DSP processing and you can have a universe with a bunch of kitchen utensils that all fit in one stainless steel mixing bowl. You should have hear the fantastic German frame drummer, David Kuchermann and I playing steel mixing bowls as we walked around the poor parts of Nashville looking for junk shops to buy instruments in. It was really beautiful! Okay, now the ringing of acoustic multiple loops. I use the AKG C1000s with the hyper-hyper cartiod plastic focuser it comes with. It sounds fantastic but as long as there is open air monitoring you will get bleed. I think the solution is threefold: 1) don't use many acoustic loops and make sure you do your drum looping first........this is crucial so as not to bring in your guitar/bass/key sounds into the bleed into the mix or 2) buy radio shack wireless headphones for $70 USD and elimnate all your other onstage monitoring 3) buy costly in ear monitors. When I can't use my wireless headphones, I just keep my overdubs to a minimum. I hope this helps. Wish I could have seen you play, buddy. Hasta la looping, Carnal! rick ps the handsonic is really cool, but it lacks viscerality for my purposes and people get more joy out of watching you play physical objects. Tell that to looper Tom Roady, though, who does mind bogglingly beautiful things with his Handsonic drums and Zendrums.