Re: Drummers and Syncing

[RA336@aol.com]

Ok... I was perhaps a bit brief in my explanations... 
I'll get a little more informative here:

>>I have spent 9 years in a band with two people looping with delays and 
>two
>>other people looping with samplers...

>You are a rare case then. Tell us more!

Enrapt with the textural possibilities of looping, (and being a
songwriter...) I decided early on to make it my mission to utilize looping 
in
every way available to me in order to expand the palette of the usual band.
Having an incredible electric violinist put us well into the game to begin
with tho...

>>the delay-based loopers were me (stereo guitar>modified pcm42>jamman and
>>our violinist (stereo violin>tc2290>digitech 8 second delay)...

>Of those machines only Jamman accepts MIDIsync, right?

that's right...

>>the sampler loopers were the drummer who generated his own loops and
>>triggered his own click in a headphones setup... and the keyboard player
who
>>used sampled and sequenced loops. He would at times send midi clock to 
>the
>>drummer and to the delays in cases where we wanted hard sync.

>So, how did he do that?

The drummer, when triggering rythm-based loops would create a loop of a 
click
sample which would loop at the same rate as his "musical loop. He could
monitor all his samples and loops via a mixer in his own setup, and have 
his
"click loop" only show up at his mix, and not to the mix he sent out to the
desk.
When Mr. Keyboard was in charge of rythm-based loopage, it would likely be 
in
the form of loops which were created earlier and assembled in a hardware
sequencer... (much of the time, this would be samples of my 
guitar-originated
loops; but that's another item...) A track of the sequencer was dedicated 
to
sending a note on command- one per measure- to the drummer's sampler. This
would trigger the drummer's one-measure click loop, or rythmic pattern 
loop.
In addition, as long as the sequencer is on, it can be set to transmit midi
clock which can be read by the JamDude

>>Other times,
>>mr. drummer was master of time and our subsequently perfomed looping
>>synce-on-the-fly and previously created and sampled loops all somehow
>>managed to sit.

>Wow! How that?

Drummer's playing to a click, or to a rythmic loop he has created out of
samples. It's a short stretch to figuring out the temporal center, usually 
in
BPM's. Translate that to ms ad you have a basic, but generally very 
reliable
starting point as to how long your loop oughta be. I use the PCM42 for
ambient type loops and generally go with a "feel" thing as to how across 
time
I want that part of my material to flow... I would just get a general idea 
as
to where to be lenght-wise for each selection. Then again, when on top of
that you are using something like a JamMan or Echoplex, it's just a matter 
of
getting into practice in creating rythm loops on the fly... it goes back to
old studio techniques before they had any way of machine talking to
machine... they called it "wild syncing". 
(I've actually seen this done plenty of times in the studio where the
engineer will be bouncing tracks from one multitrac to another, with no 
form
of hard sync. It's cool and a little exciting, especially when it works;
which it can be made to do with practice...)

>>We were and continue to be (I think) one of the very few song-oriented
bands
>>to be using techniques like these.

<uff> So it is possible. Sterile? Chaotic? The same as any band, just less
musicians?

Definately NOT sterile. Lots of fun, and makes for some really thick,
beautiful extra-planetary stuff. As for chaos; what's wrong with chaos now 
an
agin? This goes to my original premise of trying to infuse hese elements of
strange, unusual and unorthodox into my songs....
... I get the sense this list is mostly instrumental-music people...
It just happens with me that I sing and writing for my voice is an 
important
parallel track I always consider when composing.
and no, -not- the same as any other band... that's always the point, aint
it?...

I'm suprised to see other monster-loopers not much talked about in this
forum. Jon Hassell, one of the true originators of the "instrument" does 
some
awesome stuff with his bands. There's also these really talented guys doing
this "street" type music with samples, turntables and stuff... incredibe, 
if
you ask me...

For those interested, I built most of the music for my last record pretty
much entirely from samples created from guitar loops. Here's the work flow:

guitar>guitar rig>jamman(receiving sync)>rackmixer outputs>speaker
emulator>sampler.

since I was creating my loops using a timing reference that was hard-synced
to the sequencer, it was just a matter of truncating my samples to have the
correct start-point. After that, it was a simple matter to lay the bits 
into
the track from the sampler. 
I actually got into working this way out of frustration with having no way 
to
store loops I created and wanted to work with. ie.: no dat machine...