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Re: Music Notation symbols for loops?



Another one of my posts referring to age-old discussions - if something has already been said and I missed that, sorry.

First of all, the target audience of the score seems to be relevant for me: is that score for a conductor, tonmeister etc. (who doesn't play the piece, but needs to know how it will sound with the loops) or for a performer (who needs to know which device-operation steps he needs to take to make it sound the way the composer wanted it)?

As I'm in the process of writing stuff for musicians to perform from a score using e.g. and EDP or Möbius, here's what I though up:

One staff: the things the musician plays on his instrument:
another staff: the things he does with his looper. As e.g. for an EDP, you typcially only perform one action at a time, this can be reduced to one line (with crosses for short press, squares for long press, and normal heads for duration-dependent stuff -> sus), and simply put a letter describing the function on top of it ("R" for record, "O" for overdub etc.). Another approach could be to have a normal five-line system and assign the buttons to pitches (e.g. low C: record, low D: overdub etc.). As for readability of both these approaches, I'm still not decided (unless the performer would use bass pedals to control his looper, then it would perfectly make sense to notate that as normal pitches and map it to his preferred set of function->key assignments, something which the drum map feature in the DAW of your choice can easily do).

For continuous values, you could use standard dynamics notation for the loop volume, and either the same or percent values in text for feedback.

A third staff then could show what the loop that's playing right now sounds (perhaps use different note heads for reverse notes?). This would only work properly in cases where we don't have gazillions of overdubs in a non-rhythmic fashion, obviously - but if you have, say, a short riff, where you then overdub a short snippet of a note and then halfspeed that, that would work.

And finally, as I'm still in that thought process - any additional input here is most welcome!

         Rainer

Buzap Buzap schrieb:
I was wondering: are there any commmon, modern music notation symbols for 
notating loops?

Any suggestions?


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