Oops!
03-01-2010, 09:33 PM
Since I see Mobius as the future of my looping, I'd be well pleased to see this forum become a sort of 'loopers central' and hopefully include more than gear and plug-ins in the discussions. This is my first effort at providing the bait for that...
I've been overwhelmed by Bill Frisell's "Live at Grace Cathedral". Every tune is a masterpiece. It's my fav after-gig-driving-home-get-back-to-sanity disc.
Ventura is an interesting cut. 8 bars (IV/IV/I/I/ii/ii/V/V) played 30 times or so, and you never get tired of it -just flip it back and start again. I'm sure the audience would have done that if they could.
I decided this morning to figure out what (and how much) was really going on in there. Doing a full transcription seemed a bit over the top, but just outlining the structure of it was a fair minimum to see the construction. After a few minutes with pen and paper, it occured to me that it might be a lot easier to just load the audio into Cubase and drop markers at the interesting points. It was a simple and interesting exercise.
I realized that there weren't loops in places where I originally thought there might have been some fragments -nothing recorded until the 10th chorus (This is an exceedingly non-technical track). More importantly, I found 10 layers going on by the end, and although it sounds quite full at that point, it's not crowded and junky, just deliciously complete.
I think the key lesson here is simplicity and restraint, and I suppose that requires what Ansel Adams harped on in his Basic Photo Series of books -what he called 'previsualization'. When Ansel snapped the shutter he always had a complete mental grasp of the finished print in every detail and every technical process he would employ to get there. Bill, more than any other I've heard in a lifetime, is the AA of guitarists.
If I get this file attachment stuff right, a PNG of the marker list is below, and a .zip file of the Cubase project (just the markers on the timeline) will show up too. If you don't have Cubase, the markers were placed at Zero and then at the first downbeat of every 8 bar cycle so it should be easy to place them similarly in any DAW if you'd like to repeat the excercise.
There's no audio attached - you can get the track from iTunes for a buck and just drop it in your DAW.
Why am I posting this? Well, I struggle with this stuff as much or more than anyone else and I've been trying to find a place to start building an approach that's more intelligent than just filling a bunch of tracks with junk. That suggests a method of thinking about it and developing some tools to analyze the stuff I like. Hopefully this offers a simple and useful approach. I hope someone else can add to it with comments or something about your own fav's.
Keith
ed. Better quality jpeg
PS: I'm not using "Loop" in EDP or Mobius terms in the marker list. I suspect it was 1 loop with 9 overdubs.
I've been overwhelmed by Bill Frisell's "Live at Grace Cathedral". Every tune is a masterpiece. It's my fav after-gig-driving-home-get-back-to-sanity disc.
Ventura is an interesting cut. 8 bars (IV/IV/I/I/ii/ii/V/V) played 30 times or so, and you never get tired of it -just flip it back and start again. I'm sure the audience would have done that if they could.
I decided this morning to figure out what (and how much) was really going on in there. Doing a full transcription seemed a bit over the top, but just outlining the structure of it was a fair minimum to see the construction. After a few minutes with pen and paper, it occured to me that it might be a lot easier to just load the audio into Cubase and drop markers at the interesting points. It was a simple and interesting exercise.
I realized that there weren't loops in places where I originally thought there might have been some fragments -nothing recorded until the 10th chorus (This is an exceedingly non-technical track). More importantly, I found 10 layers going on by the end, and although it sounds quite full at that point, it's not crowded and junky, just deliciously complete.
I think the key lesson here is simplicity and restraint, and I suppose that requires what Ansel Adams harped on in his Basic Photo Series of books -what he called 'previsualization'. When Ansel snapped the shutter he always had a complete mental grasp of the finished print in every detail and every technical process he would employ to get there. Bill, more than any other I've heard in a lifetime, is the AA of guitarists.
If I get this file attachment stuff right, a PNG of the marker list is below, and a .zip file of the Cubase project (just the markers on the timeline) will show up too. If you don't have Cubase, the markers were placed at Zero and then at the first downbeat of every 8 bar cycle so it should be easy to place them similarly in any DAW if you'd like to repeat the excercise.
There's no audio attached - you can get the track from iTunes for a buck and just drop it in your DAW.
Why am I posting this? Well, I struggle with this stuff as much or more than anyone else and I've been trying to find a place to start building an approach that's more intelligent than just filling a bunch of tracks with junk. That suggests a method of thinking about it and developing some tools to analyze the stuff I like. Hopefully this offers a simple and useful approach. I hope someone else can add to it with comments or something about your own fav's.
Keith
ed. Better quality jpeg
PS: I'm not using "Loop" in EDP or Mobius terms in the marker list. I suspect it was 1 loop with 9 overdubs.