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Looper's Delight
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On 14 sep 2007, at 13.19, Rick Walker wrote: > I've only done all improvisatory concerts for the last 10 years of > my life > but I have started to desire playing some more formal musical > concerts with my looping > gear in the upcoming year. He, he... I'm not about to loop back yet ;-)) Although I started doing improvisations with looping delays in the early eighties I spent many years during the nineties playing full time with a alternative rock / electro-dance project that was working under major label contracts. We toured south-east Asia and Germany with the records coming out all the way down to Brazil. But the sad part of that was that I had to give up all the experimental music on the side because there was never time for that. We almost got no time for playing our own album stuff either, since most activities were talk shows on television/radio or playback gigs for music industry people. On one Germany tour we had an eight piece band playing live together with eight tracks of "canned" backing audio (choir, orchestra, cinematic fx). Given this immediate background I'm dirt happy with playing completely improvised and un-canned for many more years to come ;-) > I was enthralled > with Thomas Dolby's recent spate of concerts where he had a lot of > prerecorded material > that he seemlessly added to his considerable live looping chops. Wow, you managed to catch up with one of his concerts! Great! I have only read his tech note blogs on them. He is using Logic for "MIDI looping" by what is called Cycle Recording in that application. In advance he has set up the song's arrangement as blocks on a time line (called "regions" in Logic). Some regions contain pre-recorded audio while other contain MIDI sequences to drive a soft synth or a MIDI sound module in a rack. But some regions are EMPTY and those are the ones he has pre-planned for "MIDI looping" into. When the song position pointer reaches the first region where he will record some MIDI he sets the left and right locator and pushes "C" for "cycle". Now, the nifty part here is that this empty region that he is recording into is copied as *alias* regions all the way through out the rest of the song. This means his spontaneous "cycle recording" will also pop up later in the song at the appropriate parts in the arrangement. > in the spirit > of live looping. Ye Bro, Spirit is the word! > In the long run, the larger and more mass audiences neither care > whether what we are doing is canned or > spontaneous.................they tend only to think about the music > and the performance. Yes, that's true. But don't forget that as a musician you can rely on spontaneous happenings as a way to shed a little spirit over the rest of the show. Quite often adventurous free parts makes the audience experience the canned parts as much more expressive. And hardwired canned parts will make the free parts stand out. The above is of course only relevant for musicians that play with a communicative pathos. I have read that some on this list play for their own enjoyment in the first place and take it as just another lucky coincidence if someone in the audience should like what they're hearing. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international)