Strategies for Hiding a Loop

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

in another thread, Matt Davignon wrote:
> Some musicians (such as myself) attempt
> to hide the seam, in hopes that if people lose track of the loop's
> start/end point, they will stop perceiving the loop as an unaltered
> (canned?) element.
This is a favorite subject of mine. I'm very rhythmically oriented in my 
music and I've never used
feedback for some strange reason in my looping.  Consequently, it's 
important to figure out
ways to make one's loops not sound so static.

Here are some of my strategies for
hiding the recurring nature of a loop from the listeners' ears.

1) I got this first one from Steve Lawson:    but a random filter on 
your loop that
has very strong sweeps between frequencies and high 'Q' values

2)  Use two different and non-syncrhonized loopers and make on long ambient
loop over which you put a rhythmic secondary looping track.   The loop 
will randomly
cycle against each other.   Even when they happen to coincide on each 
other's downbeats,
it will have taken so long that the audience will not percieve it as a 
coherence.

3)  With rhythmic loops you can use 'slip' functions (Electrix Repeater) 
or mute/retrigger features
(like in the EDP) that retrigger wherever you were in the loop when you 
last mute the loop so that
the rhythm plays differently, rhythmically speaking against another 
element (this also requires two
loopers playing simultaneously.

4) Use any kind of modulation or delay functions that are in a different 
time scale to your loop
(this is particularly effective with ambient loops that cycle over 
rhythmic loops but can also be used
with two different ambient or textural loops in less rhythimcally bases 
music.

5)  In software manipulation of loops,  use randomization features for 
processing or retriggering
one's looped content.

6) Using the 'scramble' functions and/or the quantized replace 
(Looperlative DL-1 terms) or INS=SUB
features in quantized mode to Replace rhythm fractions of your loop.
My brother is especially effective with this technique when using 
different feedback percentages as he replaces.

With auto swell,  volume pedal or guitar part swell or 'slow gear' 
guitar techniques,  this also is a beautiful
way of continually morphing your loops.

7)  This next one I have almost no experience with,  but Matthias Grob 
truly loves it and does it
beautifully...............using different feedback percentages to subtly 
replace original content.
I think this category could be greatly expanded by the loopers here.

8) This one only exists in the LP-2 because I put it in the software for 
this purpose:
Random Retrigger...............allows you to randomly retrigger one's 
loop (the loop continues from
the random start point whenever this is used.   Due to the nature of the 
wave forms being of unequal
volume when randomly retriggered this always causes a rhythmic 'gated' 
effect.
This is particularly effective at creating ambient or avant garde 
a-rhythmic loops and then creating
and ostinato rhythm by rhythmically playing the foot pedal like a kick 
drum.

In a best case scenario:   use a secondary looper to re-loop your results.

So, this begs the question:    What other strategies work well for this 
musical purpose?

Rick Walker