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Looper's Delight
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On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 6:59 PM, E Gross <slapbandjam@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi Loopers, > > I am new to looping and LD, have learned much in the past couple of >months. > I have checked out lots of your available music, which sounds awesome. My > question to those that perform live is, is each performance you do > completely spontaneous? Some are. Some are not. Which way I play depends on the type of gig I'm on. > Or do you start out with a framework for how you > want to build a song. For example, for those who have a CD out, do you >try > to repeat songs which are on your CD? I've done that in the past, but very rarely these days. Today I'm playing instrumental music with a point in being improvised, so it is actually more common that I take care to stay away from previously recorded material. Typical "frameworks" I like to start out with may be "noisy, loud and atonal" or "softly and slowly creating a B minor add 9 from silence". > I realize there are probably many different answers based on artistic > preference, I have been using what I call the tabula rasa method, in >which I > start playing whatever comes to mind and take it from there. Whatever noise I may create on-the-spot (tabula rasa) I always have at least a dozen instant "plans" on where I can go from there. As an improviser (or rather "instant composer") it is one of my biggest interest to learn and experiment with improvisational strategies. All these blueprints for possible music live in the back of my mind and are present in every micro moment of the improvisation. This makes it easy for me to switch over from one "future scenario" into another one and what happens in that very moment is that my complete vision of the nearest thirty to sixty seconds of music is totally replaced. It's like teleporting directly from full speed on Route 66 to full speed on Berlin Autobahn. Since all those maps are already existing I need no time to adapt to a new landscape, I just go with the flow that is already blowing. Some imaginative parameters I'm working with when improvising are: - Pace (how often will I introduce a new "cell"? How long will I permit them to stay around and develop?) - Transits (going into another landscape, how fast am I doing the teleporting, can I do it in slo-mo?) - Dense of sound (how many frequency bands am I filling up?) - Chaos/Order direction (am I breaking music apart of am I building music up?) - Gravitation (shall I emphasize a tonal center, as "the key", or shall I prevent a tonal center to be felt in the music?) - Chord analysis (what chords structures am I implying with my melody line playing? Shall I sonically create those chords by layering my instrument in a loop or shall I just create them in the mind of the listener by implementing them by the way I play melodies? Balancing the fighting against and the smoothing along with such chord structures) - Random These are of course almost the same "intellectual tools" used for ensemble improvisation with other musicians, but I've found that you learn faster when looping - because the big point in learning is to make and correct mistakes. You immediately hear your own mistakes when they loop back in your face ;-) -- Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) www.myspace.com/perboysen