Re: Sublime experience looping --warning: no guitar content!

[matthias@bahianet.com.br (Matthias Grob)]

Russell Gorton wrote:

>Latest Echoplex victim: my buddy Dan's Fender Rhodes Model Seventy-Three
>stage piano.
>
>When I picked it up to loan...Dan is a ReallyNiceGuy(tm)... I didn't 
>realize
>that these old things were totally passive electronics.  Duh.  I was
>looking for
>the power cord for, like, 3 whole minutes before I took the top off and
>examined
>the innards.  No power supply.  "Must work like one of them eee-lectric 
>guitars
>all these kids are playing nowadays..."

Amazing, isnt it? I had one of those. It still lives with a friend in
switzerland, probably not played.
I remember we used to push the midrange, probably around 2 kHz to bring out
the nice attack.
During the whole 70ies, there was no real alternative to the Rhodes:
The Hohner pianet with flat tongues and capacitive pick up was ridiculous.
The Hohner clavinet was great, with real cords, but no bass, little sustain
- marked the beginning of the funk aera.
And then there was the piano that Supertramp created their success with
(Hohner, too?), a rather childish sound, for my taste.
Around '78, the Electric Grands came, heavy and expensive, and still just
one cord per note and not very realistic sound. I think there was a Yamaha
and a Kawai. They soon became outdated by the polyphonic synths.

Only problem with Rhodes: The tone "wires" break if you attack to hard, and
they might be hard to replace, now.

>Looping several different short 8-10 second chord changes; think "Kind of 
>Blue"
>riff or something... then use NextLoop w/SwitchQuant=On to walk through 
>them.
>Then, play various inversions and diminished variations of same over the
>loops...solo notes wash over the transitions between loops.  Overdub when 
>the
>urge strikes!
>
>As with other things I loop ('cello, analog synth), I'm getting about an 
>85%
>success rate with noiseless startpoints.  What seems to help is selecting 
>a
>dominant note that is slowly decaying over each startpoint, trying not to
>attack
>that note too near the startpoint.  Each small loop is overdubbed once to 
>wash
>over the startpoint with that same note (end Record with Overdub, or end 
>Record
>with Insert in Rehearse mode until I get it near how I want it...)   Get 
>the
>startpoints of all the small loops within a range of similarity and it is
>surprisingly easy to step through the loops without any abrupt 
>changeovers.
>Loving that Echoplex...what a box!

Thank you. Great to hear from somebody that seems to *understand* the box!

>The overtones and room resonance are mind-blowing.  Absolutely gorgeous!  
>The
>"tines" (is this what they're called?--the little tuning-fork metal bar 
>guys
>that vibrate on the Rhodes' sounding board) set up washes of 
>eardrum-buzzing,
>underwater-landscape-on-quaaludes-with-Milt-Jackson-on-vibes that put 
>everyone
>(even the dog) into trance mode.
>
>The interaction between the instrument's sounding board (sustain pads 
>raised)
>and the amplified looped versions is phenomenal.  A great instrument for
>looping!

This I did not understand: Did you get some kind of feedback from the loop
into the instrument? So the notes would resonate with the look like a
sympathy cord?

Great post!
Matthias