Re-looping

[Todd Madson <crash@waste.org>]

Herd of rabid pigs?  Wow.  I want to hear that.

How did you do it?

i.e. instrument, looper, mixer of 4-track, then:

aux out into another channel of the mixer with the FX send going
to the looper device?  Or?

One of the really cool things is that many of today's drum machines
have individual outputs for various sounds/instruments.

Instead of using this for a different reverb on every drum sound, 
do this:

many of today's drum machines have bass or synth samples available.
Some of these are even tunable over a wide range.

Some have multiple basses.

So:

Run one of the basses through a back of FX and tune it way up and use
it for strange looped textures. 

(for an example check out: http://www.waste.org/~crash/asb.html
and download the track "aliensporebomb" - all of the background
textures besides guitar are processed drum machine tuned-up bass,
even the descending four note "keyboard" part.  In fact, both the
drums, bass synth, and "synthesizer" parts are all generated from
the same drum machine in real time.  It's an MP3 for those who care 
about such things.)

Then: run a separate out into a looper or tapped delay and create weird
counter polyrhythms to the main rhythm.

I don't have an example of this online yet.

You'll be glad you did.

Oh, more processing fun: I recently sent the outputs from my drum 
machine into an octave divider and did some drum patterns with
no cymbals (remember, octave dividers are one-note-at-a-time devices).

(Cymbals came later on a separate unaffected track.)

Then I ran the output from that into the Vortex and used tap tempo
to create some off-kilter rhythms).

For whatever reason, the octave divider adds enough low end "oomph"
to make the drums sound more realistic, especially with a touch of 
reverb, but not too much.

Next time we'll talk about the use of Vocoder devices on conventional
instruments.

Todd Madson
Musician, Mountain Biker, Stunt Kite Flyer, BeOS/MacOS/Linux/WinNt user.
http://www.waste.org/~crash/index.html