RE: Using a Looper with a mixer

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 3:54 PM -0500 9/4/01, M. Steven Ginn wrote:

>How should I analyze how I want to manipulate my sounds?  How do I learn
>so I can better understand the musical implications of series/parallel
>and pre/post faders?

This is an important question with many possible answers. There are 
two points to my suggestion ( "You need to analyze how you want to 
manipulate your sounds and you need to understand the musical 
implications of series/parallel and pre/post"):

The first point is that it can be helpful to examine the music you 
are making and the music you admire, and try to understand what it is 
about these musics that you like and that you want to do more of. 
Looping is not just one thing; there are many different musical 
styles and many different technical approaches. Which is/are yours? 
Are you interested in creating a sense of several musicians playing 
together by layering recognizable musical parts, or are you 
interested in creating a more disembodies wash of sound with subtly 
evolving timbral changes. Each of these approaches (and others one 
might describe) may best be served by a different setup.

This brings us to the second point, achieving a technical 
understanding of the tools at your disposal. Experience is always the 
best teacher, and one thing you can do is to maximize the number and 
variety of your experiences. One way to do this is to forget for a 
moment the idea of hooking everything up together and to explore 
single devices and single techniques. For instance, you can take two 
effects processors and hook them up in different ways, exploring the 
implications of the different configurations. You might do this 
without a mixer at first, just by using patch cords. After a while 
you can add more elements to the system and explore the mixer's 
possibilities.

One thing I like to do is to split signals and to bring them in on 
two or more channels of the mixer. This is especially effective if 
the mixer has bus assignment buttons. For instance, you could bring 
your source mix in on two channels. The first would assign the dry 
signal to the output mix; the second would feed the effects via aux 
sends but wouldn't feed any of the input to the mix. That way you'd 
have independent control over the level of your dry sound and of the 
effects send, on two faders side by side. Similarly, you can bring 
the outputs of the effects devices into the mixer on regular input 
channels (as opposed to effects returns). For instance, you could 
split the delay output and send one leg to the reverb while the other 
comes into the mixer. Then you could bring the reverb output into 
another input. This would give you the ability to mix the proportion 
of "dry" delayed signal and reverberant signal.

>I have Craig Anderton's book

Craig has been working with musical electronics since the 1960s. He 
knows his stuff and writes well about it.

>I understand at a basic level things like delay should come before reverb
>and compression should usually be first in the signal chain as well.

Most of the time those are good rules of thumb, but sometimes you can 
achieve interesting things by defying convention. What if you put the 
compressor after the reverb and then send the reverb through a 
multitap delay with ping-pong pan effects?


-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD
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