Loop approach: Loop as effect

[Mark Sottilaro <sine@zerocrossing.net>]

Hey,

Lately, I've been thinking about the different approaches of looping I
experienced at the Santa Cruz Loopfest.  The two major camps I broke it 
down to
were those who used a looper very simply (such as myself), as in a straight
loop with some percentage of feedback with external effects and those who
played with few or no effects, but used the looping device as an effect in
itself (as in Andre Lafosse).

So I just wanted to get a dialog going about the differences in these two
approaches.  One of my first proto "loop effects" was me duct taping an old
Ibanez analog delay pedal to my guitar and twiddling with the time and 
feedback
knobs while I played.  I later graduated to an old Digitech RDS8000 pedal,
which I put fat rubber washers on the knobs, so I could manipulate the 
knobs
with my feet while I played.

Later, I seemed to partially abandon this technique, when I acquired a 
bunch of
digital effects that did pitch shifting and a whole other slew of sonic
mayhem.  As my effects pallet became larger, my looping technique became 
more
simple.  With the addition of a decent guitar synth driving a synth module
that's got over a thousand sounds, I find there's rarely a time when I 
feel my
sonic pallet is limited.  On the contrary, I feel it's often too much!  
One of
the things I do in my looping, is I set up large banks of effects and synth
sounds, and then kind of randomly choose them, not really knowing what 
sound
I'm going to get.  I then have to DEAL with it.  Fun.

But then I saw Andre's little act, and I thought, "Gee that's COOL."  I 
wonder
why I didn't go more in that direction?  It inspired me to try a Repeater
experiment I've been thinking about for a while.

Start recording a loop while in Beat Detect mode.  Take off the Tempo Lock.
End the loop, and then try to manipulate the tempo by how you play.  Wacky!

Mark Sottilaro