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Hi I've written a draft for my research paper on Live Looping and Looping
Technology. If you have the chance to read this and have any corrections
or suggestions please send them my way!
Thanks
Darren Perry
Dartington College of Arts, Devon, UK
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Live Looping and Looping Technology
Introduction
“LiveLooping music is a way of extending the musical possibilities of
instruments without resorting to the use of pre-recorded material. Sounds
can be layered, altered, mixed and edited on the fly as the music is
performed.” (1)
The term looping technology refers to audio devices that are used
to record or sample live audio and play it back repeatedly, usually
controlled with the use of foot pedals. Live Looping is a relatively new
term that is used to describe the use of looping technology in live
performance. The term is also used within the “International Live Looping
Movement” (2) to describe what is often considered to be a new genre of
music born out of this movement. Throughout this essay I will use the term
Live Looping to refer to the use of looping technology in live performance
rather than the genre or movement associated with it. Looping Music, Loop
Based Music or Loop Music describes the use of looping technology in all
mediums of music, not restricted to live performance and naturally the
terms Looper and Live Looper refer to the people that use looping
technology in their work. Looping technology has applications not only
within live performance but in composition, practice, improvisation and
even teaching. The core element of looping is the repetition of audio. In
Live Looping a loop is recorded during a performance to create a
repetition. This process often happens many times in one performance and
the loops are often altered, reversed, cut and otherwise treated.
1 http://www.andybutler.com Andy Butler, 2003
2 www.looppool.info/ Rick Walker, 2003
Brief History
The early loop was a physical loop of magnetic tape(3) that passed
continuously over the play/record head of a tape player, explored by
Pierre Shaffer and Pierre Henry in the 1950s. The 1960s San Francisco Tape
Music Center spawned the introduction of tape loops into mainstream
compositions and live performances by composers such as Terry Riley,
Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Morton Subotnick, Richard Maxfield, Ramon
Sender and Le Monte Young, their music largely falling under the bracket
of minimalism, a term born out of the music of many of these composers.(4)
The most influential composers and innovators of looping in the 70s were
Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. Fripp has been hugely influential to the
development of looping largely with his Frippertronics system developed
out of Eno’s tape delay system and through working with a large list of
other hugely influential artists over the last two decades. The 80s saw
Fripp develop his solo work even further while other artists of many
different styles contributed to the development of looping.
Recently there has been a rise in the use of looping, largely through the
creation of a number of online communities (LoopersDelight.com,
Ableton.com). A number of current well known Looping artists include Andy
Butler, Andre LaFosse, Rick Walker, Kid Beyond, Amy X, Per Boysen, Zoe
Keating... The development of looping technology over the past two decades
has been the main contributing factor in the rise of its popularity as
hardware and software has become more powerful and affordable.
The most notable and affordable early digital loop processor was the
Lexicon PCM42, designed by Gary Hall in the 1980s. This was primarily a
digital delay unit which was adapted to achieve loops of up to 60 seconds.
Lexicon later went on to release the Jamman in the 1990s(5), a unit still
favoured by many current live loopers (not to be confused with the
DigiTech JamMan released in 2005). Arguably the most important development
in the 1990s was the Paradis Loop-Delay by Matthias Grob, which later
became the Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro, largely regarded as one of the
most advanced hardware looping device around even today. A survey in 2003
looking at the technology used by loopers ranked the Jamman and the
Echoplex in the top ten in popularity along with the Electrix Repeater,
Line6 DL4, Kaoss Pad I and II, Ableton Live, Boomerang Phrase Sampler,
Akai headrush, Boss RC20 and the Lexicon Vortex. Although five years old
and a sample of less than a hundred musicians, the survey does point out a
number of important devices. 2006 saw the release of the LP1 by
Looperlative. Created by Robert Amstadt, this device offers 8 stereo loop
tracks totalling four minutes thirty seconds of recorded audio space, a
significant technological development in response to the demand for more
layers in looping.
As computers have become more powerful and have started to develop their
place in live performance, looping technology has found its way into
software form. Ableton Live being the front runner of live looping
software, other applications such as Sony Acid 6 and SooperLooper offer a
cheap introduction while the programming software package MAX/MSP offers
unprecedented versatility not just within live looping but in all areas of
sound manipulation and recording. Kaiser Looper by Jeff Kaiser is a
relatively simple looping ‘patch’ written in MAX/MSP.
3 Vinyl was also used with a single linked groove that would play
continuously but was far less versatile.
4 Another term, Systems Music, was used by Brian Eno to categorise a
particular style of music often that utilised looping, including pieces
such as Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’.
5 “Like most great "inventions", the JamMan was really the work of a team:
Joe Waltz, Steve DeFuria, Wayne Hall, Will Eggleston, me (Bob Sellon) and
many others who shaped the concept into the JamMan.”
http://www.stecrecords.com/gear/jamman/ Bob Sellon, 2005
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