Composing/Planning the Looping Fun

[Steve Crumpler <yared0319@gmail.com>]

So as this is my first post, I'll offer a quick introduction.  For the past year-and-a-half has been learning how to play the violin (electric).  Originally my goal was just to learn how to play the violin, but with success I quickly expanded on that.  I decided to plan out how to create a solo electric violin looping performance.  That's what I've been focusing on (as much as I can with a full-time job) for the past few months.  Also, I'm a software engineer.  One thing to know about software engineers is that we spend months planning software in detail before we get to the part where we implement it.  A lot of creative thought goes into planning out elegantly-written software.  I believe it is similar to planning out an elegant looping structure/song.

So, hopefully my background will help explain the seeming oddness of my question ... 

How do you guys compose/plan your songs?  For the instrument-based loopers out there, do you write sheet music for the loop and free-play sections and have some scheme for organizing it or do you simply play and improvise till you have something that works?  My problem would be remembering exactly what I played from one day to the next.  Maybe it's because I'm so new to playing, though, that I don't quite have the ability to keep it all in my head the same way every time.  

Hopefully you guys have already solved my problem and can fill me in, but if not here's what I've been thinking ... First I play around with some rhythms and melodies on the piano (USB keyboard attached to PC so I can play and take notes).  Once I have some sections that I like I write the loop sections to sheet music using LilyPond.  However, that only gives the the independent section, not the whole song or when to press the pedals to start/stop/overdub a loop.  That is where I've been putting a lot of thought lately.  

So with that problem in mind I had some inspiration from my CS education.  I can think of a loop-based song like a finite state machine (FSM), which is simply a way to describe the states a machine (in this case a loop-based song) can be in and how it transitions between the states.  The only way to change which loops are playing (0 to *) is to press a foot pedal, similar to how the only way to change a FSM state is with a transition.  With that I can diagram out my loop-based song, with each loop start/end/overdub, effect on/off, effect settings, etc. to the very end.  I think this is flexible enough to be useful for mapping out any loop-based song.

Thoughts?