Re: Folk/Celtic Looping

[Grover Sheffield <gls@mindspring.com>]

Thanks for sharing some of your technique with the Celtic looping.   Sounds
very complex and intriguing to me.  As a 3 month old looper, I just loop
major, minor 11, and altered chords together in basic fingerstyle riffs,
somtimes overdub stuff, then solo over them.  It's helping my solo work a
lot.  I'm just starting to use the next loop function.   Give me a shout if
you have any tapes, etc, you'd like to swap?             Grover


t 04:37 PM 6/8/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm not in the U.K., in fact, I'm in Indiana, but I do a bit of looping 
>with Celtic songs.  I'm a percussionist so I play the melody lines with 
>marimba, glockekspiel, etc. rather than fiddle, pennywhistle, etc.  When 
>I play out, I alternate ambient "soundscape" type stuff with arrangments 
>of looped Traditional music (mostly Celtic).  So far, much to my 
>surprise, nobody's neck has snapped off.  It's quite a shock since the 
>Celtic stuff is highly structured and the ambient is highly 
>unstructured.
>
>I use an Echoplex, sometimes two.
>
>I've found it very useful to keep notes on what I'm doing.  I tried 
>writting EVERYTHING out, once.  By everything, I mean kind of an 
>orchestral score with all instruments and button presses.  Too 
>unwieldly.  What seems to work best is some short notes like the 
>following:
>
>----------------------------------------
>Campbell's Farewell to Red Gap
>
>Looper Setup:
>       sync = out
>       beats/8ths = 16
>
>Instruments:
>soft shakers
>clave
>chimes
>doumbek
>triangle/cymbal/shaker
>marimba
>glockenspiel
>
>Schema:
>Looper actions
>REC    memory 1
>shaker
>REC
>OVER
>clave
>OVER
>MULT
>chimes
>REC
>NEXT   memory 2
>MULT
>doumbek
>REC
>OVER
>triangle/cymbal/shaker
>OVER
>NEXT   memory 3
>MULT
>marimba
>REC
>OVER
>glockenspiel
>OVER
>marimba
>NEXT   memory 1
>marimba
>NEXT   memory 2
>marimba
>NEXT   memory 3
>marimba
>NEXT   memory 1
>MUTE
>----------------------------------------
>I'll write down the melody/harmony fragments seperately sometimes.
>I don't PLAY from these notes, I use them when I forget what I did, 
>usually along with a tape of a performance.
>
>I find I have to struggle with the structure.  The Echoplex interface 
>seems ideally suited for improvisational playing and much less so for 
>structured playing.
>
>The overall effect I term "Experimental Tradtional Music".  I have some 
>ideas I work from but I'm still finding my way in trying to incorporate 
>looping with traditional or structured music.
>
>