feedback (was RE: repeater question)

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 07:24 AM 8/26/2001, M. Steven Ginn wrote:
>What is actual definition and purpose of "Feedback" and why would you
>want to control it?

I think others answered for you what feedback is. If you want to learn 
more, there are a lot of articles about this topic on the Looper's Delight 
site. For example, the EDP FAQ has a whole section devoted to feedback 
questions, including the essential "Understanding Feedback and What It's 
Good For":

http://www.loopers-delight.com/tools/echoplex/FAQ8.html

there are also explanations of the feedback implementation on the 
echoplex, 
of course.

Matthias also wrote a bit about Feedback in the "tips from LD" page in the 
tips and tricks section:

http://www.loopers-delight.com/tips/Tips_fromLD.html


I'm not going to rewrite here what I wrote for the FAQ linked above, but 
in 
my opinion feedback control is one of the most essential techniques in 
performance oriented looping. It's one of the things that makes a serious 
looper into a real  musical instrument, because it gives you such an 
organic and musical control over the development and evolution of your 
loops. Feedback is one of the key things separating loopers from being a 
variation of a recording studio, or from the very static sort of loops 
that 
come from simply triggering a sampler. In those devices the loops just 
operate in parallel to you, but you are not musically involved in their 
content in real-time. Feedback (and it's complement, overdub) allows you 
to 
be musically involved in your loops, creating, evolving, manipulating, 
deconstructing.

Learning to use Feedback is one of the key things that takes you past the 
beginner stage of looping, the stage where all you do is record some basic 
loop and let it repeat forever as a backing track while you play over it. 
Overdub is the next step, where you can build and add to your loops. But 
you quickly run into the problem there where you loops only grow. You get 
what I think of as the "fish trap" effect of looping, where stuff only 
goes 
into the loops but never comes out again. Eventually you just have a 
cluttered mess, and your only option is to kill it and start something 
new. 
Feedback is what you need to reduce the loop and allows you to make smooth 
transitions to something new.

To me, the number one most serious flaw in a number of recent loopers has 
been the lack of a feedback control on the loops. The Boss RC-20 and the 
Line6 DL4 are guilty of this. They have overdub, but no feedback control!! 
So all you can do is add to your loop and grow it bigger, but you can 
never 
reduce it. You can't evolve to somewhere new. It's painfully obvious (and 
to me, irritating) when I see people performing with these devices. They 
either stick with something simple in the loop that stays on way too long 
(because they have no way to really evolve it), or they build the loop up 
too much until it is really busy and crowded and then they can't go 
anywhere with it. The music tends to become really static and not move 
anywhere.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com