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RE: Thomas Dolby: LIVE LOOPING



His blog mentioned that he was using ableton live.

-----Original Message-----
From: mark sottilaro [mailto:zerocrossing2001@yahoo.com] 
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 1:43 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: Thomas Dolby: LIVE LOOPING

--- "loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:

> Wow,  I just got from a very stimulating show, 
> watching Thomas Dolby 

It sure was a treat.  I was literally right in front
of him and it was an amazing show.
 
> What was very exciting is that every act on the bill
> used live looping 
> techniques extensively.

Was Thomas looping audio?  I couldn't tell.  There
were a couple of times it seemed like he was looping a
line using MIDI.  I saw no hardware looper, but he
could have been running a software looper.

> Genie (who had such a wonderfully creative show at
> Y2K5)  

Yeah, who knew he was the only person in the world
doing live looped guitar?  I'm glad he told me. 
Kidding aside, his set was pretty cool but man I hate
when an artist comes up and proclaimes they're the
originator of something or the best at something. 
This turns me off to a lot of rap music.

> 
> The the excellent group LoopStation performed with,
> again, Line 6 DL4s and  what looked
> from my vantage point to be a Boss gigadelay.

I was blown away by this act.  The interaction between
both of them and the energy was great.  I must pick up
their music  QUICK.  They were by far the best last
night, IMO.

> Dolby's set was just sublime replete with wonderful
> visuals.     He had 
> several cameras on his person and there were
> frequent images from one of them in black and white
> on the large screen. 

At times I thought the "Dolby cam" was a little
sickening.  To much motion!  The times he had it
slurred and slo mo were a lot easier to enjoy.  The
rest of the visuals were perfect though.

> The canned-ness of it didn't bother me in the
> slightest because he really 
> was multi-tasking and playing a lot.

I honestly though it did suffer a little from being
kind of canned.  As a person who feels kind of canned
on stage, I'm not sure I have an answer for this, but
his act was missing something that LoopStation had in
buckets.  Perhaps if he had another musician up there?
 A lot of his songs have great guitar parts, I'd love
to have seen another guitarist up there.  HIs
technical glitches didn't bother me, in fact if
further won me over to see how charming and humble he
was as he tossed teeshirts out and joked about the
technology.  Maybe it was just my mood... I've seen
Laurie do one woman tech shows and didn't think it
canned at all.  It's a minor complaint though, I had a
great time at the show... except that I had to ask the
drunken idiots next to me to stop chatting loudly to
themselves 5 times.  

Mark Sottilaro

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