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Looper's Delight
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At 7:12 AM -0700 4/29/02, Evan Meyers wrote: >does anyone know specifically if zappa ever really experimented with >looping I asked Bob Rice, who was Zappa's Synclavier assistant for several years. Bob sez: >yes, actually. During the sound checks for his live shows, he used to send >everyone away and he'd just work with his guitar rig for a while at >extremely high volume levels, mostly just improvising stuff. He'd load >snippets into a pair of MXR digital delays with extended memory of up to, >I >think, almost 4 seconds! Anyway, on the MXRs, he' d usually create 2 >different loops so if they played together they'd eventually drop out of >sync. This was the only use for the delays in the rig and they'd have 2 >dedicated combo amps that were mic'd so that he could kick them in in the >middle of a solo and then play over the top of them with his main rig. The >drummer and bass player would have to find a groove based on or around the >loops and if both were on and they went out of sync, they would listen for >the polyrhythms that would result from the kaos. For a short amount of >loop >time, there were pretty amazing possibilities for improvisation with good >players aboard. > >There is a live album called Make a Jazz Noise Here that has 2 pieces that >use quite a bit of looping. One is called Fire and Chains which uses a >massive sample patch I built for him on the Synclavier with lots of vocal >samples from the Senate hearings on Porn Rock lyrics (and warning labels >on >records ect.), that loop around at various rates and have pitch modulation >patched to the polyphonic aftertouch on the keyboard. You'd hold down a >chord and use varying degrees of aftertouch on each note to change the >speed of the samples going round and round. Again these mutant polyrhythms >would result and you could play off of them if you could feel them. > >The guitar loops with the MXR delays happened at least once everynight and >an example of that is on the cut (also on Jazz Noise) called Star Wars >Won't Work. There's also a pretty good helping of these delay solos on the >"Guitar" album (2 cds of Zappa guitar solos! NOt a desert island disc but >interesting in small doses). -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz