stereo

[William Walker <billwalker@baymoon.com>]

It was my not my intent to diss the use of stereo, For crying out loud  
guys, I use stereo all the time, the recent recordings I've been doing  
are actually using two separate rigs in stereo recorded  
simultaneously. But when I do a gig , often times I am not offered the  
luxury of either a stereo house sound or stereo monitors. If I'm  
playing solo and bringing my stereo pa, I might be forced to aim on  
speaker out and on on the floor facing back at me.  In fact it has  
been my experience that stereo is usually the exception not the norm,  
in live sound systems. So what do I do now that I don't have my  
precious stereo security blanket?  I use different delays in series  
set to different beat values to create the illusion of strereo  
imaging. It may not fullfill all of you stereo experts ear candy needs  
but it works for me in real world situations where stereo is not  
available. Obviously if you always have the luxury of stereo when you  
play live this point is moot, but I don't .  Also I was getting at an  
underlying issue that I didn't really clarify but is something I've  
had on my mind recently, and that is I'm going through a personal  
reavaluation in my own life about what is really necessary to create  
music and what is not.  Over the summer I did  20  gigs with an RnB  
singer friend of mine where we had so little set space for gear that I  
could only bring one amp. Now for the last 10 years or so my live band  
rig has always included two tube amps, in stereo split from my  
fulltone chorus. But over the course of several gigs, though I missed  
the vox amp and its sublime tremolo, I realized it wasn't essential to  
playing well and having a good experience. I've had the same epiphany  
about loopers lately. My looping has been refined to fewer and fewer  
tracks and a new  acoustic duo project I'm putting together will have  
some looping, but it will probably be simplified to a pair of simple  
loopers (we'll be using 2 LP-2's for syncing to each other). The idea  
is that we will use loops very sparingly and concentrate I writing  
material that doesn't even need looping to be delivered. The overall  
feeling I have had , is that technology needs to take a backseat so  
that I can get back to what for me is  most essential , and that is  
writing good music.
Bill