gratuitous nostalgia was: re: Looping in prehistory

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

from Jaco's biography:
"As Jaco described the effect, "I've got an MXR Digital
Delay, which I put through one amp"


Doh!!!!!!   I had remembered it, innacurately as an ADA when, of course, 
it 
was an MXR delay.
I always have a problem remembering the names of those early digital 
delays 
(MXR, Delta Labs, ADA, Korg, etc.)
They were all out of my price range and were state of the art in their day 
(and thus, fairly
pricey by a beginning musicians' standards).

I can see that unit clearly though. with it's big blue 
faceplate...............I think he was still using Acoustic  amps, wasn't 
he?

Someone posted a long time ago that they saw me using that MXR rack mount 
unit in Union Grove music about that time
using it's piddly but exciting short loop time with a microphone.  I was 
really into the music of the Ituri
Pygmies who used yodelling techniques and a cool technique where you sing 
a 
note into a short piece of
closed off bamboo (or you can use a small old fashioned ink bottle, as 
well) 
and sing a falsetto note
in between blowing on the bottles.

With that MXR unit (which I went into the store and 'demoed' every day for 
a 
week or so until I wore out my
welcome with the owner) I could make a loop and keep adding onto it, 
simulating a whole small tribe of Pygmies.
Wow, was that exciting..............and so outrageously out of my budget 
to 
buy.

****************************
This thread is really kicking off of my memory of those very exciting days 
(punk, new wave, electronic music, et. al.)
in the first couple of years of the 1980's.   At one point there were 45 
all 
original new wave bands playing in Santa Cruz
in a half a dozen small venues that featured all original music five to 
seven days a week.

I also remember using an Effectron 1024 (a massive 1.024 seconds of 
sampling 
time) made by Delta Labs at the
old Art Centre theatre in Santa Cruz.

 I made a vocal loop with it and then increased the speed so much that it 
was like a percussion loop,  completely
unintelligible for it's speed.......................and used it as the 
basis 
for an improvisation with Tao Electrical,
the group I had with Not Michael (Michael Haumesser) and Jim Rutledge that 
was a side project for our more
popular new wave band at the time, Tao Chemical.

At the end of the piece I slowed the Effectron speed down until right at 
the 
last second (literally) you could understand
that the loop said,  "It doesn't mean a fucking thing,"  and then turned 
it 
off, ending the piece.

LOL,  that sentence came from an anecdote I heard about where Baba Ram 
Dass 
had climbed high into the Himalya to find
a reclusive spiritual master who lived in a cave up on the mountain.    
When 
he got to the top of this arduous climb he asked the
hermit,  "What's the meaning of life" , to which the hermit replied,  "It 
doesn't mean a fucking thing".