Re: Backing tracks: A confession

[Mark Hamburg <mark@grubmah.com>]

On Jan 15, 2011, at 11:28 PM, Mark Hamburg wrote:

> When does my Looper's Delight membership card get pulled? When do I stop 
>getting invited to Santa Cruz to perform? ;-)

I may need to further emphasize the emoticons. Thank you to everyone who 
assured me I wouldn't be kicked out of the community.

The spark for the message was the combined events of watching another 
round of concern over lack of "core looping features" like feedback from 
the new crop of looping pedals or looping features in other pedals and 
observing how, despite several sophisticated loopers, I seemed to be using 
the technology these days.

So, yes, the specs for Roland's equipment and the devices being produced 
by others are probably largely driven by people looking to do one-man-band 
things where the looper just provides the backing. But as it ends up, 
despite a long history pushing loopers more heavily -- and I went back 
yesterday and started listening to some of my archive of recordings -- I 
very frequently just build up a moderately interesting loop and let it 
play which really isn't all that different from the one-man-bad types 
(except that my loops are probably more swirly, ambienty, etc).

The potentially interesting insight for me that comes out of this is that 
I should figure out how to get equipment to support what I seem to want to 
do rather than what I feel I ought to be doing. On the other hand, I 
should also figure out whether there's a technological reason I've moved 
away from more complex loop structures and if so whether it's worth trying 
to find a technological solution to move back towards them.

Mark