Introduction and thoughts on human/machine tempo issues

["Gene Ehrbar" <gene@anomalyinc.com>]

Hi everyone!

First, a brief introduction -- my name is gene, and I'm in Portland, 
Oregon,
USA, Earth.  I'm primarily a guitarist, though I fiddle with keys and
mandolin as well.  I've been lurking on this list for a couple of weeks, 
and
have been quite impressed with both the signal-to-noise ratio and the
quality of the discussion (you all seem to be a thoughtful, helpful bunch).

My looping is still in a pretty embryonic phase -- I've played guitar and
mandolin in a variety of (mostly rock, some bluegrass) groups over the
years, and became drawn to loop-based music when I started spinning records
a year or so ago.  I had an RC-20 for a little while, till I discovered
Ableton Live (is anyone else on this list working with Live?), the
capabilities of which are worlds beyond the Boss pedal.  My loops have been
mostly guitar and percussion so far, but I've begun using Propellerheads
Reason for synth sounds in conjunction with Live, and the results have been
pretty good so far (Reason and Live go together like peanut butter and
jelly).  I'm doing all of this on a laptop with a 4-in-4-out+MIDI USB audio
interface, so even though I end up a little cable-happy, it's still
a managable gigging setup.  I imagine if I'd been more into harware synths
before getting into this, I might be reluctant to go this route, but so 
far,
it's been great.

If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to offer some more in-depth thoughts 
on
Live.  For now, I just wanted to add my $0.02 on the whole
drummer-tempo-sync thread.  First off, I've found playing with Live the 
best
rhythm training exercise I've ever had.  I've isolated a click in Live on
the monitor
channel, and until things get sufficiently going on a particular loop, I'll
check in on the click every now and then to keep things in sync, and once
something fairly rhythmic has been established, I'll more or less abandon
the click.  I definitely feel like my timekeeping has improved in the short
time I've been playing this way.

I had a bit of a coming out last night when sitting in with a friend's band
at a party -- once the band had finished their set, I did a little looping
for the late-night crowd, and it seemed to come off quite nicely.
Intrigued, the drummer from the band crept behind his set and started
playing along.  At first, I could see some frustration on his part at 
having
to sync to the machine's tempo, but he made an effort to listen, and it
really came together.  I decided against offering him my second set of
headphones for a click, since he seemed to be doing fine without it, but
this seems like a logical step.  Any non-click-averse drummers reasonably
close to Portland who happen to see this and feel like jamming, feel free
drop me a line.

OK, enough rambling.  Nice to meet you all!

cheers,
gene