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Looper's Delight
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| Hi, I'm not much of a piano player but I do a bit of piano looping. I have a pair of uprights that I use. One is a regularly tuned piano, the other is a 'prepared piano' that I've tuned microtonally (which pissed my wife of initially, she's a traditionalist). I use LDC's on both of them into some api pre's that I have and then line level into my console. I have an Echo Pro set up on an aux that I send the signal to pre fader (with the channel fader zeroed) and the aux is then routed back to a channel and sent to protools. I also use a couple of other looping devices (MPXG2, Vortex, DL4). Everything is on old fashioned TT type patchbays so I can route anything to anything- there are a bunch of harmonisers that I use a lot on piano- they don't cope with the playing chords on the piano terribly well, which is a sound I love, so I'll set the harmoniser to 100% wet and do things like chain two in series, pitch one up and octave, and another down an octave- so it comes back to concert pitch but fails to track properly. I call it 'drunken piano'. Another loop environment I have is taking boundary mics of the pianos, feeding the room sound into my outboard reverb units set to be extremely wet, modulated and with long delays times (5s and above). Depending on the mic choice you get very dark or very bright modulating reverb washes. I don't make them much of a feature in my tracks- they get used for background noises in tracks and especially for links between sections when I can't find something more compositionally relevant. You can hear some of the ambience looping in the background of this short guitar loop: I'm a throat singer and will position myself over the piano strings and throat sing against the strings and capture that http://www.jamesrichmond.com/throat_80bpm.mp3 has the throat singing against string looping and the background noises are loops of microtonal piano patterns fed into protools and modified with some soundtoys plugins. I'll see if I can find some that sounds more like piano- I tend to modify and filter the audio a lot. It isn't high tech by any means- but works for me. The pianos are in different rooms- I have long cable runs and control the hardware remotely using Apple's remote desktop. There is a Logic environment that I use to send program changes to the echo pro to control it. Any desk changes require sneaker-net (yes, walking back to the control room). Not ideal but I don't have the room to have both pianos in my live room. Sometimes I'll just play direct to dat or some other 2 track recorder (ipod) and then use the audio as 'tape loops' that get fed into different pieces of hardware or software. The main thing is flexibility. Regards, Jim Richmond On Sep 27, 2007, at 9:23 AM, The woodshed wrote:
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