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----- Original Message ----- From: "a k butler" <akbutler@tiscali.co.uk> To: <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com> Sent: Wednesday, 9 August, 2006 15:21 PM Subject: Attitudes to instruments/loopers (Derek Bailey) > "There seem to be two main attitudes to the instrument among >improvisors. > One is that the instrument is man's best friend, both as a tool and a > helper; a collaborator. The other attitude is that the instrument is > unnecessary, at worst a liability, intruding between the player and his > music." > ...Derek Bailey in "Improvisation, It's Nature and Practise in Music". > > So I take that to mean that the instrument is either a means to produce > "the correct notes", or that is something that can be explored to find >new > sounds and new music. > Musicians who develop extended technique presumably have a certain > curiosity about their instrument which is not shared by others. > > It struck me too that this applies to looping, there seem to be a lot of > loopers who want their looping gear to perform in certain pre-defined > ways, and not many who are not tempted to experiment/improvise with the > looping device itself. On that level one I think likes to have defined perimeters to work within, and a result that is what one expects, when using an instrument or looper device. No doubt it makes for more control on the performer, though it runs the risk of being occasionally predictable if the listener is a gear-head who's paying more attention to "What patch is that?" to just enjoying the performance for its musical etc. quality. I happened to be thinking about something similar to this when vacuuming up a massive amount of workman's debris from under the floorboards yesterday. As you might recall I am slowly getting back to playing guitar after smashing my middle finger in early May, and have been sticking with the old acoustic since it makes you work harder... As a side effect I find myself occasionally recalling bits of electric playing, which in my case usually involves my beloved QuadraVerb. Given certain patches to the QV one can recreate some lovely tones - and so I pondered the fact that I'm also 'playing' the effects unit as well as the strat, yes? Is this a degradation of guitar play? Not in the electric sense, though I could envision a situation where one 'needed' to use the effects unit(s) to play - for whatever reason, be it 'only wanting it to sound like _this_', or the other end, 'hiding behind the effects while playing'. I can remember a time when I was indeed 'hiding behind the effects', but it was a long time ago. I started playing electric with the only non-cheap effects being my Cry-Baby and my Small Stone... and the occasional Dan Armstrong thingie. For distortion I used an unfortunate (for the device, not me) Panasonic cassette recorder-FM radio, which had a mono line-in and a monitor function, and allowed me to bang out some really saturated distortion. I couldn't afford a compressor or a good fuzz box at the time, and it was a happy accident that it happened, as I had no idea what I was doing. Eventually the circuits on the recorder-radio got so fried that a bad feedback situation would occasionally happen, the only resolution being to hit it (and for a few years this actually worked!). And so from such minimalistic beginnings, yada gabba hey. But in any event I had to wonder if others using effects, vsts etc had thought of the fact that one is playing everything in the signal path at times. Does this only involve when one is seeking a deliberate result? Well, there's my firecracker tossed into this room of cool cats for this morning. Off to look for victorian-style radiator-towel rail valves... Stephen Goodman * * Cartoons about DVDs and Stuff * http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack * The Loop Of The Week since 1996! * http://www.earthlight.net/Studios