Re: On being complete nerds

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

I'm currently very explicity _not_ recording any
of my current looping efforts, in an effort to
free me to restart loops while I explore certain
aspects of things... this is a little sad when I
get something good (capturing the loop after the
fact isn't that intereting to me because it's the
evolution that I find exciting).

Lately I've been focussing on two things: putting
effects before the loop vs. after the loop, and
making "sound fx" with the guitar.  For the latter,
this mostly involves pick-against-string noises or
very quick volume pedal decays of other sounds.
These sounds would not be very interesting by themselves,
but looped they can become much denser and interesting.

For the former, the thing I've been noticing is how
with some effects, the effect before the loop is
"destructive" and the effect after the loop is
"constructive", in the following sense (I'm borrowing
the terms literally from wave theory): if you
take a very dramatic effect like a tremolo, and run
the loop through it, you get an effect like the looper
was a keyboard--a polyphonic instrument being run through
an effect... all the notes get louder and quieter at the
same time, so it feels much more like a single instrument.
Whereas, if you put the effect before the loop, then two
notes coming out of the looper have already been tremolo'd,
and they're not in sync, so one is getting louder as the
other is getting softer... this sounds much more like
a delay, or a multi-track...

Both of these effects are useful...

frequent recent listens in no particular order:

Portishead _Dummy_
Lisa Germano _Happiness_ and _Excerpts from a Love Circus_
The Smiths _Meat is Murder_ and _The Smiths_
King Crimson _Beat_ (just transcribed most of _Neil and Jack and Me_)
Sarah McLachlan _Touch_ and _Fumbling towards Ecstasy_
Therapy _Troublegum_
Marillion _Misplaced Childhood_

and a few recent loopist purchases (Fripp, Torn, Durant)

Sean Barrett