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ok, first off Madonna Brittny Christina: Open Mouth Kiss having trouble concentrating on anything else.... At 08:16 PM 8/28/2003, Mike Barrs wrote: >Hi Mark, Hi List. > >New list member here... guitar player, been fooling around with the >Repeater >for a year. Hi Mike! Welcome to Looper's Anonymous! >1) Many musicians aren't interested in free-form, solo performance, >ambient >style music. that's true. Most probably aren't. But why assume that looping can only be stuck in that ghetto? Obviously it also fits fine with hip hop, industrial, numerous dance styles, rock music crossing over to either. Or for that matter, any music emphasizing grooves and repetition. It's used by acoustic fingerstyle guitarists with a bluegrass background, jam bands, jazz vocalists, and all sorts of others. It's just a technique. You can use it anywhere. >If you want to play with other musicians, a looper is a barrier >because it's like playing to a click track... which everyone hates, unless >they're another looping musician. That's true if the looper is a beginner and doesn't know how to adjust their loops with the music around them. It's no different from a beginner on any other instrument. How well does someone who just started playing drums play with others? That's gonna be just as much a tempo problem! The tricky bit is getting people to realize looping is not a preset on their effect box. You actually need to learn stuff and practice. >Don't underestimate this. I almost bailed >out of looping, until I finally figured out that I could learn how to >stomp >on the pedal in time with the downbeat if I really worked at it. great! that's a really important step actually. You control the loop, not vice versa. That includes tempo. >This is >something everyone here probably takes for granted, but it's an enormous >barrier for newcomers... especially those used to working with live >musicians where there is more live human interaction in tempo feel. > >2) Someone like me who comes from a traditional music background (blues >and >jazz) automatically thinks in terms of traditional song structures like >A-A-B-A. How many people on this list have actually tried to loop a >traditional verse-verse-chorus-verse song? I've been working at it for a >year, and it's frustrating. The Repeater fixes the bar length with the >first >recorded track, so forget an AABA song where the "B" section is a >different >number of bars, unless you want to get into a Midi pedal tap dancing >nightmare of arming and switching between loops. seems to me your problem is specific with the repeater, not looping. That's simple to deal with in the Echoplex. The boomerang might be able to do it too, I'm not sure. The jamman had the same problem of forcing all the loops to be the same length. >And then there is the >problem of the "crash to a singularity" when you've built up a looped "A" >section with bass, rhythm guitar and lead, and then suddenly move to naked >guitar on the "B" section because it needs a new bass line and new rhythm >chords. If you're not working in the ambient soundscape style, you can't >hide these transitions with washes of delay and reverb tails. But there are many other ways to deal with that. For example, using real-time copies with multiple loops can allow you to smoothly put some base into different loops and them build them differently from there. Or, for example, recording several loops in series before letting them repeat. So you play the verse as its recorded, go directly to the chorus as it records, then switch back to the verse loop and let it repeat as you add to it. To some extent too, think about arrangement. what the hell are you talking about AABA where you've recorded multiple overdubs over the A loop before you ever get to B? Or bass and rhythm and lead while also talking about looping with multiple people? Can't the bass player make his own loop? >To the extent that the Repeater (or any other looper) fits my style, I'll >use it. But I'm not going to warp my entire musical concept to fit what >the >box can do. it was kind of designed by dj's who played dance music. but not all loopers came from that perspective. >It's possible that all the people who love ambient/techno music have >already >found their way to these products, so there may not be a huge market left >to >expand into. well, no not really. Maybe all the ambient musicians did. But other than those 100 people there's lots of others who could easily be looping and more and more are. >To be clear, I love my Repeater. I love it enough to have bought a second >one when I heard Electrix was going out of business, as a backup (that >funky >non-replaceable power supply scares me). But I don't see it as a tool that >will instantly appeal to the vast majority of musicians, until the >capabilities of loopers (and especially, the user interface) go through a >few more product evolution cycles. i would suggest you at least try and echoplex and see if it works for you. >P.S. this is all in the context of the Repeater... the only looper I >understand, and I'm still just a beginner. If the EDP does a better job of >handling traditional AABA song formats, please let me know. That's one >reason I joined the list! that was a big goal of the features the echoplex has for multiple loops. you might try it to see if it works for you. I think the multiloop function of the boomerang also can do this since it was developed by texas rockers. The like AABA. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com