Belewps

["Italo De Angelis" <italoop@libero.it>]

Hi list...found this on the web...lots of interesting ideas...surely 
loopers
here can do even much better! ;-)
                                        regards.........italoop

Adrian Belew
Creating stellar compositions with guitar loops

by Emile Menasché

Adrian Belew's sonic sense of adventure is all encompassing. Most 
guitarists
spend their entire careers paying homage to the familiar sound of rock 'n'
roll that was born in decades long gone, but Belew has always pushed the
sonic envelope. In his hands, an electric guitar is not merely a loud and
more fluid-sounding incarnation of its acoustic counterpart; it's a bridge
into uncharted sonic territory -- part synthesizer, part voice, part
percussion instrument. What's more, Belew doesn't restrict himself to any
single musical environment. He'll follow up a King Crimson project with an
acoustic album, or a stint in the studio with Nine Inch Nails, or a pop
record with his long-time band the Bears, or a tour pounding the V-drums
with ProjeKct 2.

His most recent release, Salad Days (Thirsty Ear) showcased many of Belew's
best known compositions stripped down to their most basic form. In the
meantime, the man himself has been moving in a new direction. Working out 
of
his Nashville home studio, Belew has re-examined his sound and approach to
composition, a process he goes through every couple of years. "I am
developing a new vocabulary of guitar sounds with the onboard effects in my
new Johnson Millennium amplifier," he says. "A recent discovery that I
made - which is really helping me a lot - is ways to use loops, which I
comically call 'Belewps.'"

Belew has long used electronic gear to manipulate sounds in real time. One
classic example is the way he sometimes mounts a flanger (or other 
stompbox)
to his mic stand and operates the box's knobs while playing. When dealing
with more advanced hardware, Belew often uses a MIDI expression pedal to
manipulate various parameters, such as delay time, in real time. The latter
technique led to one of Belew's more famous unauthorized uses for the
guitar.

"The way I had it set up," he explains, "you were only hearing the delay -
you weren't hearing the original signal. So if I moved my foot, the delay
changed, and you could hear the sweep of it - it sounded very much like
humpback whales."

With "Belewps," Belew has taken the real-time concept even further, 
actually
using loops generated by the digital delays as a compositional tool. He
starts by setting up a delay and improvising. When he finds a passage he
likes, he records it by capturing it with the Johnson's built in 
pedalboard.
He then plays along with the captured loop to build something new. Belew is
quick to point out that these are not merely repeating figures regurgitated
by a digital delay. "The loops systems I've been doing have been ones that
are not static," he says. "Normally, you think of a loop like this: You 
play
something into [a delay unit] and [the unit] plays it back internally,
verbatim. I've been trying to work with loops you can interact with - add
to, interrupt and constantly change while you're playing. Every time you
bring the expression pedal in, you're tapping into the loop, turning it on
or off, or adding to it. You can be playing anything.

"Let's just say that I'm just jamming and improvising, and [the Johnson] is
actually recording everything that I'm playing into a two-second delay," he
continues. "Now, I don't hear that delay until I turn the expression pedal
on. So when I push the expression pedal on, I'm going to hear what I just
played for the last two seconds. After that, I can continue to play, and
that loop will continue play along with whatever new I'm playing. I can 
take
the loop in or out of the mix at any juncture."

Once a loop is set, Belew can improvise against it, playing a counterpoint
or harmony without altering the original loop. Often, however, he will
change the loop as he is playing against it. By carefully choosing his in
and out points, Belew uses the expression pedal to replace parts of the
loop, thereby changing keys or altering the nature of the rhythm. "If I 
just
briefly touch the pedal for a second - and maybe I'll just play one note -
I'm adding that note into the loop," he says. "Whereas if I just briefly
touch the pedal and play nothing, it will interrupt the loop and put a
little pause in it. So I can be playing along and every so often I can
completely change this loop."

The one thing Belew does not change in real time is the length of the loop
itself. Interestingly, he says he can tune the Johnson's delay time to fit
his natural body clock. "I had been working with a maximum delay time of 
two
seconds, and in fact I've found that my natural body rhythm fits a 1.84
seconds better," he says. "So within 1.84 seconds, I can change as often as
I want."

Belew often likes to enhance the "one-man-guitar-orchestra" vibe by running
his rig in stereo and employing different tones and effects to the music
that is looping versus the notes he is playing against those loops. "I've
found that it helps to separate the sounds," he says. "I usually have
something like another delay - usually an analog-type sound set for a 500ms
ambience so that it doesn't get too confusing sounding - plus distortion 
and
perhaps a very interesting sounding chorus, which I can bring in and out
with the Johnson's pedalboard."

Belew says he sometimes chooses two widely different sounds. For example,
he'll solo with a distorted tone against a repeating clean-toned figure to
create the illusion of "two completely independent guitar players. I've 
even
done something where the delay goes to the left set of speakers, and what
I'm currently playing stays on the right. When there's no loop, everything
moves to the middle. So the dimensions shift. The sound is shifting from
side to side as you change the pedal. It's really fascinating stuff. It's
going to allow me to go out on stage and play in front of an audience
sounding like two or three guitarists."

Belew also uses physical techniques to distinguish between the loops and 
his
live playing. "Once you have a loop you want to play something to, you can
either sound like you're doubling it, or you can play against it, almost
like Robert Fripp and I play sometimes-the same lines a little out of synch
with each other."

Interestingly, Belew tends to shy away from other somewhat similar tools,
such as sampling, preferring to keep the creative flow he gets from
interacting with the loops in real time. "I'm fond of finding little things
you can sample into Pro Tools, and then doing all the things you can do to
it: slow it down, speed it up, turn it around backwards, cut it into little
bits, etc.," he says. "But with Belewps, you really have to just jump in 
and
go."

While he admits that his quest to explore new sonic frontiers does require 
a
fair amount of intellectual energy, Belew points out that finding the
promised land is really just a matter of letting the music flow naturally.
"The pieces that I've done so far sound like they took forever to put
together, but they're really only one or two passes of guitar." he says.
"But the beauty of it is that it's simpler than it appears. I'm hoping to
develop an entirely new sound for myself. I have the components of what I'm
trying to do, and then it's just a matter of experimentation and the
scientific research of developing it into more than just improvising. The
trick is to figure out how to control what you're doing."