Re: Looping with a drummer

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Michael Peters schrieb:
> What are your experiences of rhythmic guitar looping in a band - what is 
>the
> best way to keep the drummer synced to the loop that you create? do you 
>use
> a predefined click, something like a Ableton backing track - or do you 
>set
> the loop timing by foot and leave it to the drummer to stay synced with 
>it?
> do you give him headphones or just point some speaker towards him?
>   
There's some general approaches which are possible, this is some stream 
of consciousness in rather unordered fashion.

0. The general background:
I understand it's about keeping a live group in sync with some realtime 
loops. This is possible in two main ways: a) the musicians sync to the 
loops, b) the loops sync to the musicians (automatically or manually).

1. musicians syncing to loops:
This is not so much a tech topic than a musician topic. Generally, you 
can have all musicians listening to the loop and playing according to 
it, or one musician (e.g. the drummer) listening and playing to the 
loop, and the other musicians playing in time with that first musician.
This may require to turn up the loop in the monitor mix louder than you 
would ordinarily do (for one or all musicians). To circumvent a problem 
that this can have a negative effect on the audience experience, I 
suggest headphones (but I always do suggest them, simply because it 
makes playing so much more relaxing and less tiresome).

2. loops syncing to musician(s):
a) manually:
you know how it works - one musician retriggers the loops and possibly 
adjusts the tempo by tapping. The tempo adjustment requires a looper 
which can do that.
b) automatically:
For that, you need to extract tempo information from what the musicians 
play (usually the drummer) and then sync the loop to it. A lot of the 
time, this has a tendency not to work.

3. personal experiences:
In the past, I have tried it either way. Option 2a has the huge 
advantage that basically everyone except for the loop operator can play 
without considering the loop at all, and this is very desirable for a 
lot of musical styles. 2b, as I said, will only work properly in some 
cases, and typically requires e.g. the drummer to play a pre-defined 
beat. 1 will result in the band playing synced to the loop - which may 
or may not be a wanted result.
The differences come out the most if you (accidentally or not) get the 
loop length inaccurately. Say, you're recording a 4-bar phrase (in the 
tempo the band is playing), but end the loop 1/16 note too early. If you 
use option 1, this will result in the band playing a 3-bar and 15/16th 
phrase from then on (assuming oldskool 4/4 for now...). If you use 
option 2a, this will result in a stutter at the beginning of each phrase 
(the first 16th of the loop is played twice due to the manual 
retriggering). For option 2b, depending on how the looper works, this 
will either result in retriggering (as in 2a), but may also result in an 
odd 63/64 polyrythm.

          Rainer

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