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Re: Composing/Planning the Looping Fun
hi Steve,
welcome
Steve Crumpler wrote:
So as this is my first post, I'll offer a quick introduction. For the
past year-and-a-half has been learning how to play the violin
(electric). Originally my goal was just to learn how to play the
violin, but with success I quickly expanded on that. I decided to plan
out how to create a solo electric violin looping performance. That's
what I've been focusing on (as much as I can with a full-time job) for
the past few months. Also, I'm a software engineer. One thing to know
about software engineers is that we spend months planning software in
detail before we get to the part where we implement it. A lot of
creative thought goes into planning out elegantly-written software. I
believe it is similar to planning out an elegant looping structure/song.
let's just say there's also inelegant software out there :-)
The alternative approach is
1) just get it going
2) listen to user feedback
3) accommodate the wishes of users
So, hopefully my background will help explain the seeming oddness of my
question ...
How do you guys compose/plan your songs? For the instrument-based
loopers out there, do you write sheet music for the loop and free-play
sections and have some scheme for organizing it or do you simply play
and improvise till you have something that works?
If I'm working on a piece I will just run through it over and over,
with occasional breaks to figure out how to get the looping
hardware to do what I want, or to work on the harmony/arrangement
aspects of sections.
Generally I end up with a set of "moves" on the loop technology,
some harmonic and rhythmic structure, and some compatible
melodic material, although the amount of variation per each
performance depends on the piece.
So with that problem in mind I had some inspiration from my CS
education. I can think of a loop-based song like a finite state machine
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine> (FSM), which is
simply a way to describe the states a machine (in this case a loop-based
song) can be in and how it transitions between the states. The only way
to change which loops are playing (0 to *) is to press a foot pedal,
similar to how the only way to change a FSM state is with a transition.
With that I can diagram out my loop-based song, with each loop
start/end/overdub, effect on/off, effect settings, etc. to the very end.
I think this is flexible enough to be useful for mapping out any
loop-based song.
I'd say *no*, to describe a sophisticated looping device the number of
possible
states becomes unwieldy.
..and some features like playback speed aren't easily described by on/off
flags.
Thoughts?
From a programmer perspective, the thing about a looping device is
that you're very likely to want to extend it's capabilities after
finishing it.
If you use a state machine as described I then you're likely
to end up with inelegant software with hard to find bugs.
I'd at least consider a structure whereby each loop has it's own
FSM.
Of course, I'm aware it's likely you know exactly what your about,
and that these comments are telling you nothing new :-)
andy