Music Loopers
Elly Garnand
In music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections can be repeated to create ostinato patterns. Longer sections can also be repeated: for example, a player might loop what they play on an entire verse of a song in order to then play along with it, accompanying themselves.
Loops are supplied in either MIDI or Audio file formats such as WAV, REX2, AIFF and MP3. Musicians play loops by triggering the start of the musical sequence by using a MIDI controller such as an Ableton Push or a Native Instruments MASCHINE.
While repetition is used in the music of all cultures, the first musicians to use loops in the sense meant by this article were musique concrete and electroacoustic music pioneers of the 1940s, such as Pierre Schaeffer, Halim El-Dabh,[5] Pierre Henry, Edgard Varse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. [6] These composers used tape loops on reel-to-reel machines, manipulating pre-recorded sounds to make new works. In turn, El-Dabh's music influenced Frank Zappa's use of tape loops in the mid-1960s.[7]
Terry Riley is a seminal composer and performer of the loop- and ostinato-based music who began using tape loops in 1960. For his 1963 piece Music for The Gift he devised a hardware looper that he named the Time Lag Accumulator, consisting of two tape recorders linked together, which he used to loop and manipulate trumpet player Chet Baker and his band. His 1964 composition In C, an early example of what would later be called minimalism, consists of 53 repeated melodic phrases (loops) performed live by an ensemble. "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band", the B-side of his influential 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air uses tape loops of his electric organ and soprano saxophone to create electronic music that contains surprises as well as hypnotic repetition. [citation needed]
Another effective use of tape loops was Jamaican dub music in the 1960s. Dub producer King Tubby used tape loops in his productions while improvising with homemade delay units. Another dub producer, Sylvan Morris, developed a slapback echo effect by using both mechanical and handmade tape loops. These techniques were later adopted by hip hop musicians in the 1970s.[8] Grandmaster Flash's turntablism is an early example in hip hop.[citation needed]
The use of pre-recorded, digitally-sampled loops in popular music dates back to Japanese electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra,[10] who released one of the first albums to feature mostly samples and loops, 1981's Technodelic.[11] Their approach to sampling was a precursor to the contemporary approach of constructing music by cutting fragments of sounds and looping them using computer technology.[10] The album was produced using Toshiba-EMI's LMD-649 digital PCM sampler, which engineer Kenji Murata custom-built for YMO.[12]
Today, many musicians use digital hardware and software devices to create and modify loops, often in conjunction with various electronic musical effects. A loop can be created by a looper pedal, a device that records the signal from a guitar or other audio source and then plays the recorded passage over and over again. [13]
Many hardware loopers exist, some in rack unit form, but primarily as effect pedals. The discontinued Lexicon JamMan, Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro, Electrix Repeater, and Looperlative LP1 are 19" rack units. The Boomerang "Rang III" Phrase Sampler, DigiTech JamMan,[14] Boss RC-300 and the Electro-Harmonix 2880 are examples of popular pedals. As of December 2015, the following pedals are currently in production: TC Ditto, TC Ditto X2, TC Ditto Mic, TC Ditto Stereo, Boss RC-1, Boss RC-3, Boss RC-30, Boss RC-300 and Boss RC-505.[15]
The musical loop is one of the most important features of video game music. It is also the guiding principle behind devices like the several Chinese Buddhist music boxes that loop chanting of mantras, which in turn were the inspiration of the Buddha machine, an ambient-music generating device. The Jan Linton album "Buddha Machine Music" used these loops along with others created by manually scrolling through C.D.s on a CDJ player.[16]
(From M-Audio:) Audio interfaces convert microphone and instrument signals into a format your computer and software recognize. The interface also routes audio from your computer out to your headphones and studio monitors. Interfaces typically connect to your computer via USB cables.
An interface can take the sound from a looper and allow you to hear it through headphones or speakers that are connected to it. If you have no interest in interfacing with a computer an interface is not the only option you have.
Finally, you can also bypass the looper entirely and create and layer loops in a different way using your guitar, an interface and DAW software. If you choose this route you will be creating loops on the computer in a desktop screen environment. This is completely different than using a pedal that you start and stop with your foot and may not be what you are looking for. It would be good for experimenting at home but not practical for performing.
Hm, this is pretty "opinion based." And perhaps eventually you'll want all these things. But consider researching a bit into the differences of what they can do. When I first tried a looping pedal, I imagined something like this: "I'll record one bar of a shaker and set it looping, then an 8-bar chord change on top of it. At some point I'll hit a pedal and kick in the entire 16-bar chorus that I prerecorded." But all the looping pedals I looked into had only one "length of loop" at a time; that is, if I wanted an 8-bar chord progression I had to record 8 bars of shaker, and could only pre-record 8 bars of chorus. Meanwhile, my perception is that I could lay all of this out Ableton Live and trigger whatever I want.
Generally, it's good advice to invest in your musical creativity first, and upgrade your equipment once it's holding you back. Getting your computer involved opens up a huge array of possibilities, but maybe it's too many variables at first. You might consider "hitting the limits" of what you can do with a simple looper first.
An interface will be very cheap(such as this 2 Channel USB Audio Interface on Amazon)but you will need to futz with audio software for EVEY loop, and for EVERY loop layer. Meaning you will need to do some learning on a DAW and will basically need to make a library of songs to play over to do what you want. It will not be in "real time", you will constantly need to be playing with the computer.
But you will be able to play a progression, loop it, solo over it, layer over it. Then delete it play another, solo over that one, etc. Basically have a ball with the guitar in your hands the whole time, controlling everything with the 2 foot switches.
I think a big part of the question is how you plan to use the effect. I've seen many people use looper pedals in live performance where they use the foot pedals while playing and also make hand adjustments to the knobs also while in performance. Actually, it's impressive how people can manipulate the pedal mid-performance. Kind of like an organist using bass pedals and changing organ stops.
Anyway, if you want to make mid-performance adjustments to the effect, you should think that through with a VST effect. I've only used VST plugin effects where I had to turn the effect on/off and adjust it via the mouse, which was not practical for me while playing. I had to set it and leave it until done recording a part. I understand there are MIDI footswitches to control VST effects, but that would mean buying more gear and doing research to know exactly what you want.
If the issue about the amp is only about money, and not about a worry of disturbing the neighbors, the potential upside to an amp with foot pedal effects is the relative ease of using them while mid-performance.
You need an amp as well as a looper - untrue. Some, (maybe the more sophisticated, complicated) looper pedals will have a headphone out port, so negating the use of an amp. But using a cheap and cheerful fx pedal with phones out will solve that one. If that's to keep the neighbours sane, it's a good idea, and future-proofing you for when you maybe do get an amp, for live playing, where you'll need both hands (and feet!) to loop. Again, a lot, if not most, these days, of loopers will have drum tracks and effects, all of which can be listened to through cans.
How did you first cross paths with the 16-Second Delay?
The late Robert Quine was a good friend of mine, and we used to have these crazy jam sessions. He bought one when they first came out, and when he showed it to me I just plugged in and instantly got sucked into it. That pedal took over my brain. I felt like I had been waiting for it my entire life.
What made it unique?
For one thing, there were two ways to change the speed of the loop playback once you had something recorded. One control changed the playback speed gradually, raising or lowering the pitch by small amounts. But there was also a control that changed the speed as if there were multiple tape heads spaced in different increments, and that would subdivide the speed into some sort of mathematical one-into-two, two-into-four, four-into-eight, and so on, which produced really dramatic effects.
Why did you stop using it?
It just quit working. I got another one, but it also stopped working, and by that time they were getting fairly expensive, if you could even find them. One of my greatest regrets in life is that once while I was visiting Boston a music store there had piles of them in the window on sale for $100. I could have cleaned up [laughs].
Barry Cleveland is a Los Angeles-based guitarist, recordist, composer, music journalist, author, and editor of Model Citizens and The Lodge, as well as the Marketing Communications Manager at Yamaha Guitar Group. barrycleveland.com
My problem is that the music doesn't play. Error: java.io.IOException: could not create audio stream from input stream. What does it mean? The type of my file is Microsoft Wave Sound Format and its size is 796kb. May I know what I am doing wrong? Your suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
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