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RE: "canned" loops



Title: RE: "canned" loops

besides the spaghetti sort, my band has so far used two distinct sorts of pre-recorded audio and two distinct sorts of pre-recorded midi pattern.

in the case of the audio loops, I used to put them in the sampler (which we don't use live any more) but that tied us to a particular tempo. the repeater is ideal for this as there are tracks left over for on-the-night "overdubs" (obviously we don't write over the pre-record tracks) and it will run the loop at the wrong tempo if needs be. we started doing this because there's only three of us and our guitarist wanted to do stuff with more guitar parts than he and his jam-thing could manage.

the longest such was an entire one-minute guitar piece that repeats seven times during the song, while he widdley-widdleys over it. people did mention this at the last gig- the pre-recorded aspect- and so now we are toying with the idea of capturing the loop at the start of the song instead of it already being there. risky....

mostly the loops are just atmospheric "beds" lifted from album tracks, the idea being to establish the feel of a piece as previously heard on one of our albums, by way of a reference point for our audience. then it doesn't matter so much if the other instruments don't exactly match the version the audience might know from the cd, and the tempo becomes more or less irrelevent.


the doepfer maq 16/3 is great for short midi loops (monophonic, though) because they can be edited and returned to their saved form on-the-fly. my schaltwerk's out-of-action at the moment, but it offers a little more in this area, what with being eight tracks and all.

lots of people swear by the alesis mmt8 for midi loop work on stage, but it doesn't really do anything interesting in terms of being able to vary the content of the playback. you tend to have to follow it rigidly if it's playing a song, or lean over it poking buttons to keep it interesting if it's in pattern playback. this is fine if you're in "orbital" and no-one's expecting a solo any time soon.... so I've dropped it from our rig. doing stuff by the seat of one's pants is a lot more fun for band and audience.

duncan/r.m.i.



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