Re: introduction

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Nadia Salom <nadia.salom@gmx.de> wrote:

I have recently discovered the potential of live looping as a means of realtime composition. And am interested learning about all this technique especially regarding the use of Ableton, (which still gives me a bit of a headache.)Since I always worked very intuitively live looping seems to be the best way to still keep accessing the full potential of the moment and still orchestrate many instruments.

Hi,

And welcome to this list!  :-)  

Since you have Ableton Live you can start with the Live plugin Looper (new with Live 8.0). Here comes the first choice in live looping technique: Do you want to set the tempo for Live by starting with creating a loop with your mic/instrument input? Or do you want to first start Live and listen for the tempo to play in before starting to layer audio in the Looper plugin? These are two very different approaches. Personally I only use the first one - where you create the first loop and set the tempo for all electronics based on your playing - and I can't really say much about the other method except that it works more like usual multi track recording. You have to make a setting in Live's Looper plugin in order to extract the tempo and set it for the application. Play around with one loop and learn to kick the Looper plugin into Overdub Mode and layer audio while you control its Feedback (how much of old layers that will be fed back into the loop) by a pedal or fader. Learn tricks like overdubbing one rhythm with voice/instrument while pumping a counter rhythm with the feedback pedal foot to change the background layers. This very simply setup can be taken quite far in musical terms. 

Second step in looping technique could be to use two parallel loops. This can be done by opening a second Looper plugin on a second track. If you did set the first one to pick up the tempo for Live you should set this second looper to slave to this, Live's, tempo. 

As the third step I'd like to see the technique of layering a long recording over the span of a couple of loop repeats. This action is called "Multiply" and is not supported by the plugin Looper in Live. My favorite looper plugin that supports Multiply is Mobius. Create your first loop, make a couple of overdubs and then chose Multiply and play/sing a line that evolves while your old loop is being repeated in the background. The Multiply action keeps layering your input input and making the loop longer until you chose Multiply a second time. 

A fourth technique may be to switch loop. Live's Looper doesn't support that, but with Mobius you give a command named "Next Loop" what happens then is that the recent loop stops playing and a new one is starting to be created by your audio input. But maybe you want to do this jumping between alternative loops on a parallel loop, so you can always hear what you recorded in the first loop? A typical performance scenario could then be: 

1. Create a rhythm pattern as the first loop. 
2. Layer a variation or fill into this first loop. 
3. Select a new track and create a new loop in parallel with more tonal material. This could be "intro" or "verse". 
4. While still working on track 2 go Next Loop and create "verse 2" (rhythm on track 1/Loop 1 will be heard constantly)

I think this is a much anyone can say about "looping technique". The rest is up to you and depends on what music you want to create. You have to think about what parts of the music that will be repeated in shorter loops and crate those parts early before multiplying. You may also want to make loops of different lengths to create rhythmic variation as they glide in and out of beat matching, overdubbing one layer in reverse mode or substituting short slices of the loop with new input. 

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com