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Looper's Delight
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On Tue, 19 Nov 1996, Matthias Grob wrote: > >We've used a lot of live guitar loops (mainly > >from the digitech 8-second sampler pedal), > You are talking about only one machine, being in sync or not with the > actual playing of the band, right? The 8-second is the primary one, but also the 2-second digitech sampler pedal, and some other sundry shorter delays. But yeah, the machine/machines being in/out of sync with the live band is where I'm coming from, as opposed to Fripp/Eno style situation, where the loops are the totality of the piece. > >You can wind up with just truly bizarre counter-rhythms, strange > >"accidental" harmonies, all sorts of essentially non-reproducible >results, > >which add both a "seat-of-your-pants" excitment for us as performers, >and > > It is certainly exiting for you, but how does a public think about it? > Would'nt it be the nicest to be able to "play unexpected" and produce the > clima of surprise within a synced rithmical order? (I may be totaly wrong > here) This is a good couple of questions, Matthias. The first one raises more issues than I want to get into -- any serious question of audience/performer interaction deserves at least a post of its own, and is perhaps not "loop-centric" enough to be on-topic for this list. The second one I can come up with a more concise reply for: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It would be almost entirely dependent on the piece, and what was called for in the context of the piece. Out-sync (or shifting-sync, rather) loops would be entirely inappropriate for a piece by, say, Journey, but could be entirely appropriate for a piece by DJ Spooky. My point really was just to say that out-sync loops aren't inherently "wrong" musically (even in a rock context), but an equally valid compositional element. And really, isn't any repeating loop going to "sync" with the rest of the music? It doesn't need to necessarily fit into a strict time signature quantization of time; say you're playing in 4/4; if you superimposed a loop 5 beats long over top of it, the placement of the "downbeat" of the loop will shift in relation to the rest of the music, in a regular and repetative pattern. It's not much of a conceptual stretch to dispense with the need to make the loop fit "exactly" into a quantitized beat at all at that point. (Though if someone really wanted to figure out that some arbitrary loop was exactly 4.37 beats long, more power to them. :) Correspondingly, can't the rhythm of a piece be created as much by the totality of the looping and non-looping parts as by the "base" that is being looped over? I think its somewhat of a false distinction to break the two segments apart. (If the loop is serving as something more than "ornamental sound effects", that is.) > If you use "methods" don't they end up cuting down the space for the > accidents? Probably depends on the kind of methods... give us some more > hints! I am going to pursue this part further, but right now, sleep has a higher precedence. Enjoying the conversation, --Eric Cook ecook@mail.msen.com Gravitar-Guy http://www.msen.com/~ecook/gravitar.html