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Looper's Delight
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>Because my band and my equipment have limitations, I'm >not doing a whole lot of looping in our shows. A general >question for everyone is.... > >If your collaborators are not improv based and you're working >with "standard" song structures, how do you integrate loops? > >Intros and Finales are the most natural places, but I'm interested >in blurring the lines. This is in no way an answer, but I've always enjoyed playing along to CDs and "adding" rhythm and semi-lead guitar parts to them. So recently I've been exploring trying to use my Jamman to do this. A lot of assumptions I would have made about it not working don't seem to be true: - the music can be relatively dense already - the music doesn't have to stick to a single key Now, the latter one is an iffy proposition. Since I'm trying to make really sustained looping textures, those textures _do_ need to fit throughout. So an atonal speed metal monstrosity is not going to cut it. But I've found that a lot of songs may use, say, a I/IV/V and a major II or a major VI or some such in their main chord progression (if they modulate or whatever, that's something different entirely). One obvious approach in this case would be to restrict yourself to notes that come from all of the keys needed to play all of the chords (e.g. the notes in common between C and D to cover C,D,F,G,A). But, I've found I can get away with picking a single key which is "compatible" with the song, and limiting myself to notes from that key (and rarely an accidental or two); the song itself has an "awkward" harmonic structure implying that key yet deviating it, and the textural loop sustaining that key does not end up seeming too dissonant (well, if done right). I haven't really described what I _do_, but there's no real science to that. I've used loop lengths with no time relation, loops that are 4 beats or 2 beats long in a 4/4 song, loops that are 5 or 3 beats for a 4/4 song which shift around out of phase in pleasing ways, etc. Sometimes I turn the mix knob so the performed notes are much louder than the loop, and in the context of a dense song, the loop becomes effectively inaudible. This often makes for an interesting effect when the song ends, and I stop playing, and whatever I've been playing recently has built into a loop I couldn't hear (and wasn't consciously thinking about). Of course, it sometimes sounds like crap, but it's still a pleasant surprise to suddenly hear this thing and realize it was always there... and you can turn it down quickly enough--it just ends up being an oddball outtro. Anyway, I'd say that for me it's an interesting experience and good practice (especially because I'm not actively playing with anyone in the first place); whether it would be for anyone else, I cannot say. My current play-over CD: "King" by Belly. PS: Oh, as to "intros and finales"--a related thing happens to me playing over "Seal My Fate"... It starts very sparse--clean guitar, spare drums, simple major key, nice to put a loop over. Then it's pretty busy, but 2/3 through or so they drop down to the spare arrangement as a little "climax" (hmm, anti-climax? it makes the return to the chorus very "big")--so I get a nice moment when it drops back down and the loop becomes very prominent, but has changed drastically from how it sounded at the start. Sean Barrett (in my younger days when I had no looper I used to solo over Let the Power Fall, so this is a nice reversal)