the extension of the Keaggy thread about looping live...

[Steve Lawson <steve@steve-lawson.co.uk>]

>>From: Steve Sandberg <stevesandberg@earthlink.net>
>I've been looping for about a year now, and find that I absolutely love it
>at home.  I can get lost in loops, I can play and hit wonderful zones 
>where
>I feel that I can go on forever, I sometimes create loops that I can 
>listen
>to for a long long time and go to some wonderful emotional places with.
>However, sometimes it's just dry -- and not really happening -- and this
>seems pretty much out of my control.
>And this makes it kind of scary for live performances.  I like the freedom
>of looping.  I don't really like planning things in advance -- but it 
>seems
>out of my control whether anything is going to work live or not.
>Another thing that seems to make things work or not is, the levels of
>overdubbed sounds in a loop really contribute to making something ordinary
>or magical -- and this seems hard to control, too.
>I recently did a half hour of live looped music in Williamsburg
accompanying
>modern dance.  We recorded two nights of videos -- and the first night
>(which, oddly, I thought was the better one) made me cringe.  The second
>night was pretty good.
>I'm wondering if my looping experience is par for the course, or if 
>there's
>something I'm missing -- anyone have any thoughts on this?<<<

Just  to echo (loop? evolve? cross-fade from?) what everyone else has said 
-
you just got to do it. A few things that helped me early on - the first was
having some gigs booked to think towards - nothing focusses your thought 
WRT
gigs like actually having gigs on the horizon. It made me do two things -
practice the 'tunes' I'd started to write (basically just cells that were
the basis for further improv, though some have no morphed into actual
compositions - shock!horror! ) and the other was to practice improv - to
develop a level of control and awareness that I could execute the ideas 
that
were coming to me, and also mould the ideas as they came out of the loops
into the next thing.

I also very quickly realised that in an improv setting there are a few
components that go into making the music what it is - you, your state of
mind, your gear, your history, the audience, your relationsip with them,
your perception of your relationship with them, the venue, background noise
and temparature. when you're playing at home, a lot of that is very
different to when you are doing a gig, so the flow of ideas is modified, 
and
I find that given favourable conditions, my concentration is working at a
much much higher level in front of an audience. I've got quite good at
allowing an audience to inspire me rather than restrict me, though there
have been occasions when I've censored my own music for being to odd in the
face of a non-plussed audience (one of the perils of doing varied stuff I'm
afraid - if someone books me on the strength of the nice pleasant stuff on
my first solo album, and then gets some more 'noise' oriented stuff, it can
be a little shocking - there were a few people who came to see the solo 
bass
looping tour that Rick Walker, Michael Manring, Mox Valentino and myself
undertook earlier in the year, having heard my solo stuff before, and were 
a
bit traumatised by some of the more bizarre improv moments in the
Manring/Walker/Lawson trio stuff... :o)

So say I, get out there and book up some gigs - it'd probably help if you
had some sort of tape of the kind of thing you're doing, just so venue
owners etc. know what they are getting, but if you're willing to play for
free, you may well be able to find coffee shop stuff to get some 
practice...

have fun - the worst thing that can happen is that you're totally rubbish,
and that's not so bad - you just have another go and hope to get better 
with
time... :o) 

cheers

Steve 
www.steve-lawson.co.uk