Re: Music Notation symbols for loops?

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

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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