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Looper's Delight
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on 5/27/03 9:16 PM, David at vze2ncsr@verizon.net wrote: > 1) Live looping and recorded looping are (only) as different as live vs. > recorded music. > Potentially definitions of looping need to deal, and possibly distinguish > between looping in live and recorded situations. Today, recording > technology allows for musical elements to become repeated literally with >cut > and paste simplicity. It's valid, it's cool. I love it. Isn't it >looping > too? And if so, maybe it's good enough to just distinguish between > "realtime" looping and "recorded" loops. My points 2 & 3 partially > explains why. One of the things I've realized as I've thought about recording v. performance is that part of the value in performance is in watching the music get constructed. That's part of why hitting play on a drum machine is somewhat of a downer in a performance and why multi-instrumentalists make such interesting performers at looping festivals. (Pete Coates was particularly impressive at Y2K2.) The audience for such events presumably draws on people who are interested in that process. Drum machines are also damaging to the performance aesthetic in the same way that hitting play on a CD player is damaging: It opens the question as to how much is essentially canned. (This being said: Hans demonstrates that you can make a performance out of playing drum machines, but it really needs to be the focus of attention for the performer.) In a recording, in contrast, much of that performance aspect is lost. If you are a musician and in particular a musician who uses loops, you can analyze how the material was put together. Skilled listeners can do this as well. But for most people, the final aural product is all that's really available to judge. If a drum machine makes it sound better, go ahead. If it's cut and pasted together, go ahead. I'm not sure where this leaves "live in the studio work" that characterizes so much jazz. Some of that is just budget constraints that limit how much editing and overdubbing is viable, but there is also some vestige of the spontaneity of live performance that gets left in this way. When done well, the music breathes in an organic way that studio constructed music can lose. >From a personal standpoint, it's been interesting for me to find that >after doing a bunch of stuff with a 4-track cassette deck, I upgraded first to a reel-to-reel 8-track and then a digital 8-track only to find that I'm more comfortable recording essentially live to 2-track. As a result, my recorded work is essentially a lot like my live work except that it's generally had more rounds of prep work experimenting with motifs and has the post option of being deleted if I'm really unhappy with it. Whether it breathes or not, I'll leave for others to judge. (I've got a Roland VS880 that I'd be willing to sell moderately cheaply. It's really only getting used when I'm working with someone else and want 4 inputs so that we don't have to worry about the mix.) I'm also without a drum machine right now. I've contemplated the ER-1, EM-1, XL-7, and Machinedrum, but I haven't resolved whether it would improve either my live or my recorded work. Mark http://www.baymoon.com/~mark_hamburg