What's Wrong with Loops

A looper replies
Thanks, Rick. You gave us a lot to think about there. A few comments:

1. The problem I was attempting to describe was simply that it’s hard
   to vary the inner voices in a chord when you’re working with pre-recorded
   chords. I think we agree on that.


2. Digital looping tools like the JamMan are a recent development,
   but, as you know, live tape looping has been going on for decades. In 1989,
   I saw a fascinating concert in Tokyo based on a tape loop running between
   two modified Walkman cassette recorders. The performer would record a sound
   into one Walkman, and then it would emerge from the second quite a while later,
   Frippertronics-style.
   
   
   
   As a listener, I enjoyed the sense that I was watching history being made
   and that I would soon re-experience it. The sounds were interesting, too.
   Many came from small bits of metal amplified with contact mics. The materials
   would shriek, pop, and groan in unexpected ways as the performer distressed
   them theatrically. The second time the sounds appeared (through the tape delay),
   I remembered the dramatic ways they were made. I came across a CD from the
   performer years later and didn’t find it nearly as interesting.


3. Looping as a concept, of course, goes back centuries. Think of Pachelbel’s
   “Canon” or Ravel’s “Boléro,” both beloved
   works. Again, I wasn’t criticizing looping, but pointing out that most
   looping software is block-oriented rather than note-oriented, which makes
   it hard to explore harmony.


4. I have heard Kid Beyond, as I noted in my reply to Warren Sirota
   below. (O’Reilly will be revising its blogging system soon, which should
   make it easier to browse comments.) I’m looking forward to hearing him
   perform live at NAMM.


5. Your “complexity vs. simplicity” observation makes sense. I’d
   say surprise and variety are also worthwhile musical goals. It was only recently
   that I started thinking about food in terms of texture as well as taste. Juxtaposing contrasting elements is a fertile source of expression.


6. “It’s all good. It’s all the human spirit trying to express
   itself.” Amen! —David

Harmony
Thanks, glad you like the mp3s. The harmony is definitely NOT parallel. It's performed by a series of Reaktor "event table" modules. If you look at the screenshot at the bottom of this page...

...there is a sequencer into which you program the chord progression of the song. This is the large table at the top. The first row sets the roots of the chords and the second row sets which scale the chord comes from. You play a lead line into it via MIDI from the outside; I use a WX-7 wind controller. There is a module that figures out how far the current lead note is above the next lowest root. Like if the root of the current chord is C and you are playing an F#, this will output a value of 6, regardless of which octave you are playing the F# in.

The module at the lower right is a harmonizer that contains rules for how far each of the three harmony voices should be below the lead for each of the 12 notes of the octave, for the current root and chord type. The first row is the distance of the 2nd voice below the lead, the second row is the 3rd voice, etc. The Reaktor event table module lets you flip instantly between different tables, so these tables change every time a new chord type happens, being controlled by the scale table in the sequencer. I have different tables programmed in for different styles, like there is a 1930s version (with diminished 7th passing chords), and 1950s version, a quartal version, etc, based on stuff I got out of books on jazz arranging.

The module at the left is a crude walking bass line generator that picks notes out of the current scale and plays a lick on that scale, like 1-2-3-5, 1-3-5-7, etc. This is the bass that you hear in the "Freddie Freeloader", "Out of Nowhere", and "Swing in Ab" mp3s.

I had been trying to build something like this for a while, but Reaktor is the only synth I have that is powerful and flexible enough to pull it off.

Mark Smart
http://www.marksmart.net

harmony is overrated
Hi David,

Yep, I sic'd the dawgs on you...

I realize that the headline was meant to do grab attention and not be too subtly nuanced - my own headlines were usually the only parts of my articles that were rewritten, because I stink at them (my own muckraking operates a little differently :-)).

I just wanted to make sure that the live loopers, who are doing truly interesting and innovative things, get a little credit and attention for their efforts.

And, yes, I had the pleasure of hearing/seeing Kid Beyond perform at the Y2K4 live looping festival in Santa Cruz. I was blown away (not too common for me) - he's not only quite a musician, but a really dynamic performer/entertainer as well. I only wish I could attend one of his workshops (if he's still giving them).

Say hi to Amy if you see her - we went to Mills together. She's a uniquely talented individual in so many ways.

Best wishes,
Warren

A looper replies
I hear the frustration about looping programs like Garage Band, Acid and Ableton's Live.

The inherent block nature of laying down loops and repeating them can frequently cause a lot of stasis: especially harmonically:

That being said:

When you first learn how to play a guitar or a piano it take a long time to learn how to play more complex harmonic pieces or progressions.

Similarly, when one learns how to use loops either in a software program or in a live looping situation, it takes time to get sophisticated doing such a thing.

Let us please consider that the first mass marketed live looping box, the Lexicon Jamman
didn't hit the scene until 1995. My brother and I bought one of those immediately and began trying to learn how to use it at once.

The first mass marketed looping program ACID didn't appear until the very late 90's (I'm not even sure exactly when 1.0 appeared). I began trying to make interesting music with that paradigm in the year 2000.

Imagine not only that you started using a guitar or keyboard ten years ago but that they only invented the instrument 5-10 years ago.

Sophistication takes time so to judge the looping world right now 5-10 years into it's
initiation is really a little ahead of the game.

To critique it.............by all means.........there's a lot to critique.

But if you could have seen and heard the sophistication and astonishing musical diversity that 40 live looping artists from 9 countries displayed in Zurich this summer or that 50 artists from 7 countries displayed in Santa Cruz and San Francisco in October I think you'd have a different take on the subject.

This thread was brought to the attention of the huge live looping mecca website, Loopers Delight (almost a million webhits a year) and most people agreed that the world knows and hears about the 'block' orientation of the Garage Band/Acid/Ableton's Live paradigm but that very few people know just how sophisticated the International Live Looping movement has gotten.

Even as far as the Garage-Aced-Live world goes, please go listen to what Kid Beyond is doing with Ableton's Live before you right the whole paradigm off.

**********
Additionally, I have been reading the excellent book on the making of the seminal modal jazz record, 'Kind Of Blue' by Miles Davis.

Miles felt in the long run that the spelling out of complex chordal harmony and the whole bop multi chord progression approach was incredibly limiting in the long run.

'Kind of Blue' opened up the soloists to playing more harmonically free, precisely because the scale was limited.........it left more space.

When Teo Macero used some of the very first tape loops of the drummers on 'In a Silent Way' (which birthed the fusion movement) he also similarly openened the way for the percussionists and the melodic and chordal soloists to do much, much more with rhythmic placement.

There is a lot of sophistication in music that comes from chordal and harmonic complexity
but the use of loops has also led the way for a tremendous upsurge in the publics exposure and appreciation of complexity in rhythm and timbre in the past 20 years since samplers became really prevalent.

I've found in my own life of performing and composing in styles as diverse as rock and roll, world music, abstract electronica, found and invented sound, funk, soul, jazz, etc. that no matter how sohpisticated a listening audience that it is pretty difficult to throw more than a couple of layers of complexity at them and expect the audience to 'get it'.

In other words, I you have bop rapid fire chordal changes or complex stacked, suspended chords over modal approaches that it's really difficult to play with just as much attendant
rhythmic complexity (polyrhythms, complex odd time signatures, stacked and dense interlocking rhythmic parts) or with as much attendant timbral complexity.

Try playing Donna Lee with the timbral complexity of Nine Inch Nails or some of the Industrial bands and it just doesn't work.

Play music with the rhythmic freedom and intensity of high powered Indian musicians and then lay dense chordal structures or complex and rapid chord progressions and most people will fail similarly.

If harmony is your thing...........it's beautiful. But there are artists as complex and sophisticated as Mark Isham (who's music I adore, by the way) who use loops..........they just are using other approaches (timbre and rhythm, primarily) to create their complexity.

It's all good. It's all the human spirit trying to express itself.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Wonderful Solstice and a Bitchen Kwaanza to everyone,

Rick Walker aka |()()p.p()()|
producer/promoter:
Y2K5 International Live Looping Festival
Every October in Santa Cruz, California

Harmony
Thanks for the link. Nice stuff! If you have a chance, please tell us how the Reaktor patch works. Can you shift individual notes in a chord, or do all the notes change in parallel? —David

harmony is overrated

Hey Warren! Good to hear from you.

From the flurry of comments, I guessed you had linked to my blog on the Looper’s
Delight list, so I went there and read the thread. I particularly liked this
note: He probably also gets bored when Mark Rothko only used one or two blocks
of color in a painting when he could be painting all kinds of "happy little
trees". Sheesh.

So to clarify, “What’s Wrong with Loops” was meant to be
a punchy title. As another commentator noted below, it would have been more
precise to say, “What’s Wrong with Using Loops in the Most Obvious
Way (and ‘Wrong’ Really Means ‘Unsatisfying’).”

Again, my point was that looping technology provides so much instant gratification
that many people—myself included—often don’t explore further.
And yes, I primarily meant drag-and-drop looping, not David Torn-style performance
looping. As he noted in my book, the tools heavily influence the music; he composes
differently on computer than Echoplex/Repeater/PCM 42.

Ableton Live does support loop overdubbing, which, as a fan of Torn and Amy
X Neuburg (www.isproductions.com/amy), I look forward to exploring. Have you
heard what Kid Beyond is doing with it? Check out the movie link at the bottom
of this page: www.ableton.com/index.php?main=artists&sub=kid-beyond

Happy trees,

David

Harmony
>It’s hard to explore harmony when you're
> building songs out of loops.

It's not that hard:

Mark Smart
http://www.marksmart.net

harmony is overrated
P.S.: there are many approaches to using loops. DB, as an Ableton user, probably uses what I would call a "static" approach to looping; ie., drag a drum loop from somewhere, add in loops that you've found elsewhere, put it together. Acid creators would probably have a similar approach. In contract, Echoplex (for instance) loopers overwhelmingly tend to be LIVE loopers, adding layers in front of you. This almost inevitably tells a kind of story and has a progression of events that the static approach might lack.

harmony is overrated
Well, harmony is not really overrated, but it is certainly not everything.

Nothing beats, for me, Django Reinhardt at his peak - yet, I still listen to and enjoy other music without being tempted to devalue it, David. And yeah, he's no Beethoven, but then Beethoven was no Django. Each has their pleasure. Isn't this obvious?

What loop musicians often offer, from my observation, is a focus on intimate and quirky sonic artifacts that *cannot* be artistically presented in a more traditional harmonic context.

As in all types of music, there is good, bad and indifferent (all pretty subjective, of course). But I highly recommend the latest Looper's Delight compiliation, available at loopers-delight.com. Quite a variety of interesting material there.

Warren Sirota

What's Wrong with Musicians
I would claim that musicians whose only tools are new software hosts are catching up to what the process of music creation really is: putting together pieces (licks, fragments, motifs, loops, whatever you call it) into new compositions -- they don't call it 'composing' for nuttin'

The critical piece missing in most software is simple transposing (!) ACID 2.0 introduced this ('S' to split a clip, +/- to raise/lower the pitch of the newly split clip) and is still, with Beta 6, the most direct way of doing it.

By comparison, only in the latest FL studio have they introduced WAV pitch manipulation, and then, you have to wait for it to re-render.

As far as limitations go, I have found the restrictions of key/transposing software no more limiting than say, trying to voice 4-part chords on guitar. And the software is only getting better...

Micro-Transitions | Steve Reich, Arvo Part
I was fortunate to interview Reich in the book, too. He laughed when I asked him how he walks the fine line between repetition and boredom, then took me through several of his pieces, including “Come Out,” explaining how he made them evolve. “Repetition by itself is a cheap trick,” he said. “But it’s a gold mine if applied with some intelligence.”

Thanks for the Part tip. I’ll look up that recording. —David

It's a Rhythm thing
Very good point. Rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre—there’s so much rewarding territory to explore, and any one of those has worlds in itself. My realization was really not what’s wrong with loops but what can go wrong when you use them in the easiest, most obvious way: you miss out on some of those other components of music. —David

Micro-Transitions | Steve Reich, Arvo Part
The seminal tape-loop must be that of the early work of Steve Reich where he played to analogue tape of the same material simultaneously on different players - the physical difference in the players meant they gradually over time slipped in and out of phase in a perceptually surprising and often beautiful way.

My mind associates those works with same kind of natural transisition and resolution over time worked out on instruments by Arvo Part in The "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" - used in Leos Carax's "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf" (1991) and elsewhere.

See also:

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

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

It's a Rhythm thing
Rhythm is the most fundamental unit of music. It can stand alone. Without rhythm, melodies don't exist and harmonies don't progress. Unfortunately, four on the floor dance music explores only narrow aspects of rhythm.

But I too love those harmonies most of all. I like a chord progression that's going somewhere and ain't nobody gonna stop it.

Give some Parker blues changes and I'm in orbit.