Re: livelooping workshops

[Christian Carrière <carriere.christian@gmail.com>]

Interesting. Sounds like a great course Per ! Kudos to you for developing that. The first one to ever use tape manipulation techniques (although not in real time) was Les Paul, inventor of the multi-track, in the late 1950s. He was speeding up and slowing down an 8-track tape machine to add guitar overdubs at different speeds, then bringing everything back to the original speed, thus imitating bass lines and rhythms. A true genius...

 

I've been using the EHX 2880 multi-track looper in similar ways. Cranking it up an octave, adding a layer... taking it back down, etc. It creates a greater frequency range, a fuller real-time arrangement...

 

Chris

2013/11/10 Art Simon <simart@gmail.com>

Hi Per,

Fascinating post! I'm not sure I understand "looping as a way to execute all the classic tape music techniques in real-time." Would what Terry Riley did with pitch shifting and cutting sound in and out on Poppy Nogood be an example of this? Who else uses classic tape music techniques?

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 3:48 AM, Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Michael Peters <mp@mpeters.de> wrote:
> who has done livelooping workshops and can contribute some experience and
> ideas?

A few weeks ago I did one at the University's highest jazz program. In
general I followed the same schedule Fabio lined out. A useful
experience I can share here is that today's students do not know
anything at all about IRCAM, Terry Reilly or even Steve Reich. This
forced me to use more time that I had planned to line out the history;
pointing out the line from the late 50's tape music techniques
(Musique Concrete) to today's modest Roland pedals. I may be a helpful
introduction pointing out the two major approaches: (1) looping as a
real-time multi tracking method and (2) looping as a way to execute
all the classic tape music techniques in real-time. With this overall
perspective the students can much faster comprehend the rest and get
creative.

What distinguishes "a workshop" from "a speech", "a lecture" or "a
seminar" is that in a workshop everyone gets to participate in some
hands-on activity. A good practice I've used in previous workshops is
to gather students (with their instruments) sitting in a circle round
a mic (+ plus line-in facility) feeding a looper. I've found Mobius on
a laptop optimal for this when projecting the Mobius GUI screen to a
big cinema display. That way everyone can see a real-time graphical
representation of what we're doing when going Record, Reverse, Instant
Multiply x 3, Next Loop, Next Track etc etc. I repeat in short, from
the previous theory block, what all commands do and let the students
carry out the action with their own instruments. A nice way is to let
the "ad a sound" turn rotate the circle around.

In case drummers or very rhythm theory interested students are present
it may be a good idea to use the last ten minutes to go deeply into
this. Doing things like recording two parallel loops and then explore
all kinds of poly rhythm relationships by applying Instant
Multiply/Divide x 1/2/3/4 to one of the two loops. One may also go
into advanced scripting or whatever these deep students care for. This
way you stay free from the risk that deep students may alienate other
students too early by asking complex questions; you can just say
"let's cover that in the last part" and take a note. Less deeply
interested students can leave if they want when you get to that last
part.

I wrote a PDF with illustrations and hyper links on last month's
seminar but unfortunately, for this, only in Swedish. Some day I will
translate it to English but at the moment I can't see a time window
for that.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen

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Art Simon
simart@gmail.com

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((d(-_-)b))