what are you (not) looping

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

An interesting question I'd like to start as a followup is "What are you 
not
looping" ?
or:
Are there any instruments you play ("instruments you play" in the more
general sense of "noises you create") which you do not loop?

Personally, I have several different instruments and have looped most of
them:
keyboards (lots, my second instrument)
electric bass guitar (in different varieties, my main bass being a
six-string tuned in sixth-fifth tuning through a VBass)
electric guitar
trombone
saxophone (mainly soprano)
voice (including spoken announcements, noises picked up from the audience,
cell phone calls,...)
effects (I did some performances where I would weirdify a normal instrument
(with the effect not necessarily going through the amplification) and then
looping only the effect signal. And I used combinations of effectors as
instruments themselves (the DL4 is excellent for this, really cheap
distortion pedals with an open guitar cable work also great, every kind of
filter, and this in combination with ring modulators, reverbs, delays ->
into the loop)
loops (re-looping loops themselves in any creative way, both live loops and
prerecorded material)

What I didn't loop:
acoustic guitar (I'm not a good guitar player and thus didn't tale the time
to set up microphones etc. to loop my own struggling with the acoustic)
recorder (same goes here)
acoustic drums/percussions (don't have any of these myself)


As you see, I loop mostly every noise I create. Still, I've begun to see 
the
reason why lots of people here (and a lot of really famous loopers) are
guitarists: the guitar seems to be an excellent sound source for creative
looping. I'm not enough of a (bass) guitarist to give more valid reasons 
for
this than the possibility to play both chords and expressive melody lines
(i.e. more expressive from the technical means than keyboard parts), the
fluency of lots of guitarists with effects in general and effects you step
on in particular, the "electricity" of the guitar as a simplification of 
the
technical set-up (compared, say, to looping a classical harp).

Anybody could further comment on this. And anybody can name instruments
he/she plays but doesn't loop, or instruments which are totally inept for
looping?

        Rainer

Rainer Straschill
Moinlabs GFX and Soundworks - www.moinlabs.de
The Straschill Family Group - www.straschill.de
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