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Looper's Delight
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>The point was that many of you are clearly influenced by Robert Fripp and >admire him. Many others here never even heard of him before, as shocking >as >that may sound. Some people are in between and have heard him a bit and >might want to learn more about what he is doing with looping and why some >people think so highly of him in that regard. Since this list is about >looping, it would be really great if some of you RF experts could teach >the >rest of us about his looping techniques, looping conceptions, loop >approaches, etc. It's difficult, because Fripp has never (to my knowledge, and I think I've read almost all the English language interviews/articles about him of any substance) explicitly detailed how Frippertronics or Soundscapes work. There have been vague overviews, but I've never seen a hardcore breakdown of his signal path or flow control. It's not enough to say "two Revox's feeding each other with a four-second delay between the record and playback heads, blah, blah, blah..." Or maybe just not enough for me--I've tried to listen to "Let The Power Fall" (for instance) to get some sense of how the equipment was working, and I still can't duplicate it with a four-second delay. And I don't try to--that's not the point. About two minutes or so into one of the pieces, suddenly all this new stuff comes in, and I scratch my head. I defy anyone to precisely replicate what's going on during a Soundscapes piece. They're seriously dense (except for the parts which are, uh, seriously minimal...)The "mistakes" you'll make attempting to do so (for all the people with four 2290's....) will probably lead you into all sorts of new, more *personally* interesting realms. I think it was Adrian Legg who said that when he was teenager, he tried to copy records, and got it wrong, then he tried to copy local "hot" guitarists--and got it wrong, and after years of getting it "wrong", he had his style. I suspect that part of this is to give the curious enough to go on, but not enough to precisely duplicate what Fripp is doing. Eno has said that he never writes down any of his settings for effects, synthesizers, etc, in order to prevent him from becoming reliant on the same stock sounds/approachs, and also to preserve the possibility of a Wonderful Mistake when trying to replicate a past approach. This "telling, but not telling" approach has probably led to thousands of people trying to imitate Fripp and ending up with something of their own. Or maybe just thousands of mediocre Fripp-wannabes. It was only recently that I saw a passing mention in some article that Fripp continued to use the 2290's because of their ability to sync to each other in odd ratios--5:7, 31:8 or what have you. That was it, just one line in the middle of an article. I've never seen him detail the differences (mixers? realtime control?) in his Revox Frippertronics setup versus the dual EH-16 setup, or the evolution of the Soundscapes rig (which now, apparently, has the ability to operate in, uh, quad...), but the music he produced with these setups is very different. I have read that he believes that every nine months, there's a jump forward in processing capibilities, and its difficult for him to keep up. Maybe he doesn't try to do so anymore. As far as his looping conceptions, I think the "best way to make a lot of noise with one guitar" says a lot. There's a brief outline of how he views Soundscapes on the DGM site (I don't have the address handy--search for "Elephant Talk" and follow that link, if you're interested). Travis Hartnett Mindless Fripp Follower