WAS: Who uses "looping" in their promo material? NOW: Prerecordedmaterial

[Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: kkissinger@kevinkissinger.com 
>[mailto:kkissinger@kevinkissinger.com]
> 
> I just put the finishing touches on a new composition -- entirely live
> looping -- that I have written specifically for the Y2K7 Loopfest.
> Last June (at the electro-music festival) Warren Sirota encouraged me
> to explore different theremin timbres and many of the ideas in this
> work are based on Warren's suggestions.   

Uh oh... taking *my* suggestions - never a good sign :-) 

> While most of my work is
> performed live with pre-recorded tracks, I took the Y2K7 festival as a
> challenge to do an entire set of 100% live-looping works with no
> pre-recorded elements.
> 

That sounds exciting, Kevin. I wish I could be there to hear it. Those of
you who'll be there - try not to miss this one. There aren't too many
Theremin virtuosi around, and KK is definitely one such. He's exciting to
watch.

Kevin brings up another interesting topic - the use of pre-recorded
material. A hundred years ago, I was interviewing the amazing bass player
Brian Bromberg for my MIDI Guitarist newsletter, and I asked if he used 
MIDI
sequences to accompany him onstage. His response was something like, "why
use something that's as prone to malfunction (i.e., wrong patches, 
whatever)
as that, when you can just prerecord the backing tracks to DAT?" (this was
before CD-Rs were common).

This comment has haunted me for years. It's tied in, for me, with Arthur C.
Clarke's Third Law (according to Wikipedia) "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Warren's Hypothesis: In
live musical performance, magic quickly degrades to boredom.

I mean, if backing tracks are good in order to obtain a musical effect, why
not just record the *whole* performance? Why perform live at all? Is this
just an economic mechanism, really, to avoid rehearsing and maybe paying 
the
band that "should", in an ideal world, be playing the tracks? And if we're
not in an ideal world, is this a good compromise?

I'm currently torn about this myself, because I'd like to go off and do 
some
solo jazz guitar brunch gigs and the like, and I sound *so* much more
polished playing to Band-in-a-Box tracks than I do when I do the difficult
solo jazz guitarist thing. And then there's the looper possibility - I 
could
certainly record live chords and bass without a melody once through each
tune and then play heads and solos over that, but is that better than
playing with backing tracks? Of course, the best solution is probably to
just write off those possibilities and find places that can book a duo, and
hire a piano player to play with me. In this case, I think it does come 
down
to an economic argument.

And then, beyond backing tracks per se, there's the issue of triggering
smaller clips. For most of us, I think, that's a little tricky unless we
*start* by playing to a clip, because there's the issue of getting the clip
to sync to us. But, even if that issue were solved (and for some of us it
may be), is this a desirable thing?

Just exorcising my inner demons here... Interested in all your thoughts.

Warren