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Adrian Belew's Loops
I pulled this off the Adrian Belew web site, thought it might be of some
interest to you all.
Q- So the sound inspires a musical counterpoint, as opposed to you writing
a
song and then searching for some sounds to make it work.
Belew - "Actually, I do both things. But it’s very convenient for me if,
when I find a new sound, generally I’m playing something and think "This
is
cool, I ought to write a song with this." But if I’ve already written a
song
and I know I want to take the guitar in a certain direction, then I can
sit
down and design that sound for it.
Right now, I’m using a new amplifier called the Johnson Millennium. It has
wonderful built-in effects, which are going to be very helpful for me to
create the next generation of guitar sounds I’ll work from. A recent
discovery that I made, which is really helping me a lot, is ways to use
loops, which I comically call "Belewps." And the loops systems I’ve been
doing have been ones that are not static. Normally you think of a loop and
you play something into it and it plays that back internally. I’ve been
trying to work with loops you can interact with—add to, interrupt, and
constantly change—while you’re playing. This is all done with an
expression
pedal: Every time you bring the expression pedal in, you’re tapping into
the
loop, turning it on or off, or adding to it."
Q - Do you ever do something where you might use some kind of distortion
or
other modulation effects into the loop and play over the loop with a
different kind of sound?
Belew - "That’s what I am doing. The Johnson Millennium comes with a
pedalboard, and you can determine whether or nor something is being turned
on or off by manner of a normal footswitch, by manner of a momentary
switch,
so that it’s just being turned on as you’re stepping on it, or by hooking
it
to an expression pedal. Now, the loop is already on the expression pedal.
On
the other footswitches, I usually have something like another delay,
distortion, and perhaps a very interesting-sounding chorus. Because I’ve
found it helps to separate. Once you have a loop you want to play
something
to, you can either sound like you’re doubling it, or you can play against
it, almost like Robert Fripp and I play sometimes—the same lines a little
out of synch with each other—or you can choose a sound that’s so different
from it that it really does sound like two completely independent guitar
players."
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