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Looper's Delight
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(maybe that's a better heading, or more interesting/useful topic...)
I've probably mentioned this before, but back in 1978-9, the only effect we had in our tiny attic studio was tape delay. to achieve the length of delay we wanted would've meant running the three-head deck slower than we otter, given that it was also the master recorder. so I put a spare play-only deck next to it..... the effect we wanted (& got!) was a discrete layering rather than a repeat echo. we didn't know anyone else had already done it. natural born loopers.
I think what prompted this was watching the tape-loop go around on a borrowed wem copicat, & wondering if the owner would mind if I moved all the heads along so that one of the replay heads would be where the record head should be. by this time, we'd discovered that the copicat's permanent magnet erase head could be removed.
anyway, none of this had anything to do with robert fripp, whose rig I did not know about until 1980. by this time, we were old hands at the two-deck thing. I have used ferrograph tube decks, revoxes, even uher portables.
for lack of a sequencer or any form of multitracking, I took to cutting recorded keyboard phrases into loops, then playing them off into another deck & editing the results. we used loops like this in the context of a live rock band too, either with these phrases (one on each of two tracks), sustained chords or sound effects.
fast-forwarding a bit, my first sampler was the mighty powertran mcs-1. built from a kit, 8-bit with dbx, & a huge 64k of ram, which could be backed up onto floppy with the aid of a bbc microcomputer.
then came a boss 1/2 rack delay which had a f/sw socket on the back for freezing the contents of it's memory.
I tried cutting loops of tape to use in my mellotron.....
eventually, I managed to get my guitarist to try the mcs-1.... we got the delay length adjusted so his guitar phrase would loop around in time with the sequencers (this is all free-running), but he had to use the "unfreeze" footswitch & rerecord his part whenever it began to drift. we still use the thing- I have two of them.
but we couldn't rely on this, & so I started looking around for something we could sync up. no-one could be persuaded to part with a bel bd-80 delay, with it's triggered repeat function.... this would be early 1995... & the jam-man was just new on the market in the UK. we bought one right away.
a few years later, I bought the last one in the UK, & expanded them both. my guitarist won't go anywhere without his.
then came the repeater.....
the full list of solid-state loopers (i.e. no tape decks):
2 x jam-man
2 x DL4
1 x vortex
2 x repeater
1 x headrush
1 x EH 16sec reissue
1 x DOD dimension 12
1 x boss rps-10 (the 1/2 rack pitch-shift/delay)
2 x powertran mcs-1
various boss digital delay pedals
I think that's the lot. :-)
duncan/r.m.i.
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