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Looper's Delight
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in another thread, Matt Davignon wrote: > Some musicians (such as myself) attempt > to hide the seam, in hopes that if people lose track of the loop's > start/end point, they will stop perceiving the loop as an unaltered > (canned?) element. > > This is a favorite subject of mine. I'm very rhythmically oriented in my music and I've never used feedback for some strange reason in my looping. Consequently, it's important to figure out ways to make one's loops not sound so static. Here are some of my strategies for hiding the recurring nature of a loop from the listeners' ears. 1) I got this first one from Steve Lawson: but a random filter on your loop that has very strong sweeps between frequencies and high 'Q' values 2) Use two different and non-syncrhonized loopers and make on long ambient loop over which you put a rhythmic secondary looping track. The loop will randomly cycle against each other. Even when they happen to coincide on each other's downbeats, it will have taken so long that the audience will not percieve it as a coherence. 3) With rhythmic loops you can use 'slip' functions (Electrix Repeater) or mute/retrigger features (like in the EDP) that retrigger wherever you were in the loop when you last mute the loop so that the rhythm plays differently, rhythmically speaking against another element (this also requires two loopers playing simultaneously. 4) Use any kind of modulation or delay functions that are in a different time scale to your loop (this is particularly effective with ambient loops that cycle over rhythmic loops but can also be used with two different ambient or textural loops in less rhythimcally bases music. 5) In software manipulation of loops, use randomization features for processing or retriggering one's looped content. 6) Using the 'scramble' functions and/or the quantized replace (Looperlative DL-1 terms) or INS=SUB features in quantized mode to Replace rhythm fractions of your loop. My brother is especially effective with this technique when using different feedback percentages as he replaces. With auto swell, volume pedal or guitar part swell or 'slow gear' guitar techniques, this also is a beautiful way of continually morphing your loops. 7) This next one I have almost no experience with, but Matthias Grob truly loves it and does it beautifully...............using different feedback percentages to subtly replace original content. I think this category could be greatly expanded by the loopers here. 8) This one only exists in the LP-2 because I put it in the software for this purpose: Random Retrigger...............allows you to randomly retrigger one's loop (the loop continues from the random start point whenever this is used. Due to the nature of the wave forms being of unequal volume when randomly retriggered this always causes a rhythmic 'gated' effect. This is particularly effective at creating ambient or avant garde a-rhythmic loops and then creating and ostinato rhythm by rhythmically playing the foot pedal like a kick drum. In a best case scenario: use a secondary looper to re-loop your results. So, this begs the question: What other strategies work well for this musical purpose? Rick Walker