Re: RE: How far does looping go back? Farther than you think....

[mwsmart@insightbb.com]

> on another note, did edison (or more likely, emil berliner) ever
> encounter a locked groove during their early sound-recording
> experiments?
> did it ever happen with the disc recorders that prevailed before WW2?
> did anyone (a young les paul, perhaps?) lark about with it for musical
> effect?
>
> duncan.

Pierre Schaeffer in France did a lot of experimenting with locked grooves on records before the tape recorder became widely available. AFAIK he didn't use it for looping of traditional melodies & chords, etc but to create pieces of "musique concrete":

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer

 

Interesting stuff. But the locked-groove effects on the early things have short delay times of a little less than 1 second. Probably 1/78 of a minute due to the 78 RPM speed.

 

On a somewhat related note, did anyone here ever get the issue of Mad Magazine with the record in it called "A Super Spectacular Day"? It had the grooves set up so it would play a different ending each time depending on which one the needle happened to fall into. I assume this means there was a continuous circular groove at one point that had multiple spiral grooves going inward off of it. Kind of cool effect.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_A_Super-Spectacular_Day

 

Mark Smart

http://www.marksmart.net