Loopy Pro: FIRST LOOK

[Deleted User]

Looping can also be pretty lofi and grubby. I used to have a kinda low artistic expectation of looping, and the first time I saw this guy I didn't have great expectations. But he turned that around during the first song.

mistercharlie

These videos are great, and thanks for the great short history @celtic_elk .

I like to use looping as an improvisational tool, but I’m not a fan of the typical looping performance. They tend to just keep adding layers, and the audience has to sit through the buildup.

That Delaney Davidson vid is something else though. Blues fits the form perfectly, with its repetitive rhythm parts.

Loopy Pro is really interesting because it brings a timeline, so you can structure the song. You can, if I understand correctly, have blank sections on the timeline that auto-record when you get to them, like the Octatrack’s record trigs. And you can then combine live looping with pre-made loops and one-shots.

lukesleepwalker

@mistercharlie said:
These videos are great, and thanks for the great short history @celtic_elk .

I like to use looping as an improvisational tool, but I’m not a fan of the typical looping performance. They tend to just keep adding layers, and the audience has to sit through the buildup.

That Delaney Davidson vid is something else though. Blues fits the form perfectly, with its repetitive rhythm parts.

Loopy Pro is really interesting because it brings a timeline, so you can structure the song. You can, if I understand correctly, have blank sections on the timeline that auto-record when you get to them, like the Octatrack’s record trigs. And you can then combine live looping with pre-made loops and one-shots.

Correct, it’s a whole different compositional tool.

audiobussy

@MarkR said:

@gregsmith said:

(snip)

I believe this KT Tunstall performance was instrumental (pun intended) in bringing looping to the mainstream in the UK. I remember lots of people talking about this performance as if it was some sort of magic.

Imogen Heap looped her way through this tune back in 2007. (Ah, the days of 240p resolution. lol)

This artist is new to me. Holy smokes

celtic_elk

@mistercharlie said:
Loopy Pro is really interesting because it brings a timeline, so you can structure the song. You can, if I understand correctly, have blank sections on the timeline that auto-record when you get to them, like the Octatrack’s record trigs. And you can then combine live looping with pre-made loops and one-shots.

Zoe Keating uses Ableton in live performance in pretty much this fashion: she’s listening to a click, and the session triggers recording and subsequent loop playback in accordance with her arrangement of the particular piece.

For non-"typical" live looping performers, I’ll (again!) plug Andre LaFosse, who makes full use of the EDP’s ability to multiply a loop’s length while you add another layer on top, insert or replace audio in the middle of a loop, and chop the current loop down to a smaller (sometimes only a few tens of milliseconds) loop to use as a new base. Andre’s loop lengths and textures constantly ebb and flow in performance, and like a DJ, he segues from piece to piece rather than stopping to build a new piece again from an empty loop. Highly recommended.

lukesleepwalker

Thanks for the suggestions, @celtic_elk. I mentioned the other night that Loopy Pro has caused me to do a creative pause. I think I said something like “I’m not sure I’m making the music I want to make” which came out perhaps sounding like LP could stifle creativity. It’s actually just the opposite. But because I’ve been thinking in a binary way about live looping OR MIDI looping using LK or Helium, I have had to pause with LP to think about the in between scenario where I “pre-compose “ sections but live loop the arrangements. Tantalizing!

gregsmith

@audiobussy said:

@MarkR said:

@gregsmith said:

(snip)

I believe this KT Tunstall performance was instrumental (pun intended) in bringing looping to the mainstream in the UK. I remember lots of people talking about this performance as if it was some sort of magic.

Imogen Heap looped her way through this tune back in 2007. (Ah, the days of 240p resolution. lol)

This artist is new to me. Holy smokes

She’s fantastic.

I can recommend listening to Hide and Seek on headphones. Also, see if you can spot the sample 😉

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@celtic_elk said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
@celtic_elk said:

@pax-eterna said:
hahaha, I better start learning the original I have before attempting this one - soooo deep! Never really got the idea of looping though tbh - I sorta thought it was the domain of guitarists

I'm gonna have to be That Old Guy What Does the History again, aren't I?

I would be interested in reading such a piece.

I’m sure that there are more extensive histories of looping online, written by better-informed people, but here’s my condensed version:

Looping has been around as a compositional technique since at least the 1950s, used by people like Stockhausen and Reich, and was in use as a live-performance technique by the mid-60s, picking up steam when Terry Riley and Robert Fripp started to do it. For the first few decades of looping, you had to set your loop length in advance, either using a tape loop of a fixed length, or using an electronic delay with a set delay time (the Lexicon PCM 42 and the TC Electronics TC 2290 were rack delays frequently used for this purpose; the EHX 16-second Delay and the Digitech PDS series did basically the same thing in a pedal form). It’s hard to accurately capture a rhythmic figure perfectly with such a setup, so the music made with this technique tended towards arrhythmic, if not "ambient," forms. (iOS musicians who’ve used Gauss, which is an explicit callback to old-school tape looping, have a sense of how this works.)

Punch-style, or "phrase sampling," loopers, where you could determine loop length on the fly by pressing a switch at the beginning and end of your loop, started to appear with the original rackmount Lexicon JamMan in ‘94 and the first Boomerang Phrase Sampler pedal in ‘96, but didn’t really start to take off until Line 6 included a model of the Boomerang in its DL-4 delay modeler pedal, released in 1999, which was maybe the first really popular multi-algorithm delay pedal. The DL-4 was cheap, it was ubiquitous - you could find it in most local musical instrument stores - and it did things besides looping, which meant that a lot of people who might not have sprung for a stand-alone looper incidentally had one to experiment with. This was the point at which high-profile artists like Radiohead start using looping overtly in performance and recording, and guys like Keller Williams started to build careers on looping "one-man-band" performances. This created a market for small, easy-to-use phrase loopers, which the major pedal manufacturers were happy to fill (Boss, EHX, Digitech, TC). There were more complex live loopers as well, but they never caught on massively in the same way - Gibson stopped making the rackmount Echoplex Digital Pro, arguably the most feature-packed hardware looper ever built, in 2003 or so; the rackmount Electrix Repeater never really took off; and Boomerang was in and out of production with the multi-loop Boomerang III pedal over the years. (There were other niche devices as well, and some players turned to software solutions, but I’m trying to keep this short.)

Thanks to the Internet, a dedicated looping community has been building up over the years, and it’s become visible enough that a few boutique hardware builders have decided to experiment with making more complex hardware loopers. A couple of them have built on and even extended the Echoplex Digital Pro feature set, notably the Glou-Glou Loupé and the looping module in the Poly Beebo. Others have taken more idiosyncratic approaches, like the recent Chase Bliss pedals, or the various "micro-loopers" like the Hexe Revolver that work on pretty short looping times for glitch and stutter effects. The last three years or so have seen more innovation in the hardware looping space than in the prior couple of decades, which is pretty exciting.

Here endeth the lesson. 😄

Thanks; I learned some new things. Much appreciated.

u0421793

I first encountered looping from a slightly earlier source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gormanghast/6920010771/

(Referenced from this article: https://www.paulgormanis.com/?p=4844 )

R_2

As most of us Loopers know, it’s all about getting the timing right

anickt

@u0421793 said:
I first encountered looping from a slightly earlier source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gormanghast/6920010771/

(Referenced from this article: https://www.paulgormanis.com/?p=4844 )

They did some great stuff together. I usually play the song “Discreet Music” (from the Eno album of the same name) when I go to bed. Very loopy.

Eno’s tape loop system became the original Frippertronics. That’s all being re-discovered today.

I use Harry Gohs (Virsyn) Tap Delay to get a similar result.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

I recently saw someone claim that Frippertronics was "the first" something or other. Is there any truth to this? I thought they were doing tape delay looping in San Francisco twenty years before anyone heard of Frippertronics. My impression is that Fripp's only contribution was naming it after himself.

Check out this record from 1968, for example:

celtic_elk

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
I recently saw someone claim that Frippertronics was "the first" something or other. Is there any truth to this? I thought they were doing tape delay looping in San Francisco twenty years before anyone heard of Frippertronics. My impression is that Fripp's only contribution was naming it after himself.

That accords with my impression. Riley and others were clearly doing things with tape loops and Frippertronics-style delay systems a good decade before Eno invited Fripp to see his setup. A more extensive history post (not mine): http://www.livelooping.org/history_concepts/theory/the-birth-of-loop/

anickt

@celtic_elk said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
I recently saw someone claim that Frippertronics was "the first" something or other. Is there any truth to this? I thought they were doing tape delay looping in San Francisco twenty years before anyone heard of Frippertronics. My impression is that Fripp's only contribution was naming it after himself.

That accords with my impression. Riley and others were clearly doing things with tape loops and Frippertronics-style delay systems a good decade before Eno invited Fripp to see his setup. A more extensive history post (not mine): http://www.livelooping.org/history_concepts/theory/the-birth-of-loop/

Definitely was being done before Fripp/Eno. I think they just raised awareness during the time they were using it. There was no internet as we know it now so information about such a thing was scarce.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@anickt said:

@celtic_elk said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
I recently saw someone claim that Frippertronics was "the first" something or other. Is there any truth to this? I thought they were doing tape delay looping in San Francisco twenty years before anyone heard of Frippertronics. My impression is that Fripp's only contribution was naming it after himself.

That accords with my impression. Riley and others were clearly doing things with tape loops and Frippertronics-style delay systems a good decade before Eno invited Fripp to see his setup. A more extensive history post (not mine): http://www.livelooping.org/history_concepts/theory/the-birth-of-loop/

Definitely was being done before Fripp/Eno. I think they just raised awareness during the time they were using it. There was no internet as we know it now so information about such a thing was scarce.

It wasn't common knowledge, but anyone taking an experimental music class in college would have known about by the mid-70s easily. It's in that classic textbook of the era (whose title and author I've forgotten).

mistercharlie

Maybe it was the live, re-recording aspect that was new with Fripp?

celtic_elk

@mistercharlie said:
Maybe it was the live, re-recording aspect that was new with Fripp?

Terry Riley was already doing that in performance in the late ‘60s. If Fripp and Eno were the first anything in that regard, they were probably the first musicians with substantial popular visibility (via the prog-rock scene) to use that setup, which is maybe why "Frippertronics" stuck in the popular imagination and Riley’s "Time-Lag Accumulator" didn’t. 😄

mistercharlie

I’llm tell you one thing—those names are terrible. If someone had coined the term “looping” back in the day, they would have all the credit now.

kinkujin

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@celtic_elk said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
@celtic_elk said:

@pax-eterna said:
hahaha, I better start learning the original I have before attempting this one - soooo deep! Never really got the idea of looping though tbh - I sorta thought it was the domain of guitarists

I'm gonna have to be That Old Guy What Does the History again, aren't I?

I would be interested in reading such a piece.

I’m sure that there are more extensive histories of looping online, written by better-informed people, but here’s my condensed version:

Looping has been around as a compositional technique since at least the 1950s, used by people like Stockhausen and Reich, and was in use as a live-performance technique by the mid-60s, picking up steam when Terry Riley and Robert Fripp started to do it. For the first few decades of looping, you had to set your loop length in advance, either using a tape loop of a fixed length, or using an electronic delay with a set delay time (the Lexicon PCM 42 and the TC Electronics TC 2290 were rack delays frequently used for this purpose; the EHX 16-second Delay and the Digitech PDS series did basically the same thing in a pedal form). It’s hard to accurately capture a rhythmic figure perfectly with such a setup, so the music made with this technique tended towards arrhythmic, if not "ambient," forms. (iOS musicians who’ve used Gauss, which is an explicit callback to old-school tape looping, have a sense of how this works.)

Punch-style, or "phrase sampling," loopers, where you could determine loop length on the fly by pressing a switch at the beginning and end of your loop, started to appear with the original rackmount Lexicon JamMan in ‘94 and the first Boomerang Phrase Sampler pedal in ‘96, but didn’t really start to take off until Line 6 included a model of the Boomerang in its DL-4 delay modeler pedal, released in 1999, which was maybe the first really popular multi-algorithm delay pedal. The DL-4 was cheap, it was ubiquitous - you could find it in most local musical instrument stores - and it did things besides looping, which meant that a lot of people who might not have sprung for a stand-alone looper incidentally had one to experiment with. This was the point at which high-profile artists like Radiohead start using looping overtly in performance and recording, and guys like Keller Williams started to build careers on looping "one-man-band" performances. This created a market for small, easy-to-use phrase loopers, which the major pedal manufacturers were happy to fill (Boss, EHX, Digitech, TC). There were more complex live loopers as well, but they never caught on massively in the same way - Gibson stopped making the rackmount Echoplex Digital Pro, arguably the most feature-packed hardware looper ever built, in 2003 or so; the rackmount Electrix Repeater never really took off; and Boomerang was in and out of production with the multi-loop Boomerang III pedal over the years. (There were other niche devices as well, and some players turned to software solutions, but I’m trying to keep this short.)

Thanks to the Internet, a dedicated looping community has been building up over the years, and it’s become visible enough that a few boutique hardware builders have decided to experiment with making more complex hardware loopers. A couple of them have built on and even extended the Echoplex Digital Pro feature set, notably the Glou-Glou Loupé and the looping module in the Poly Beebo. Others have taken more idiosyncratic approaches, like the recent Chase Bliss pedals, or the various "micro-loopers" like the Hexe Revolver that work on pretty short looping times for glitch and stutter effects. The last three years or so have seen more innovation in the hardware looping space than in the prior couple of decades, which is pretty exciting.

Here endeth the lesson. 😄

Thanks; I learned some new things. Much appreciated.

Thank you. Me too!

Telstar5

@pax-eterna said:
hahaha, I better start learning the original I have before attempting this one - soooo deep! Never really got the idea of looping though tbh - I sorta thought it was the domain of guitarists

Are the two similar?

0tolerance4silence

How’s everything guys?
Don’t forget to keep us posted - maybe make the thread sticky?

lukesleepwalker

@0tolerance4silence said:
How’s everything guys?
Don’t forget to keep us posted - maybe make the thread sticky?

Beta is going great. There were a few folks complaining about the chatter about the beta so I stopped posting here to be respectful to their concerns.

0tolerance4silence

@lukesleepwalker said:

@0tolerance4silence said:
How’s everything guys?
Don’t forget to keep us posted - maybe make the thread sticky?

Beta is going great. There were a few folks complaining about the chatter about the beta so I stopped posting here to be respectful to their concerns.

Beta discussion obviously belongs to other channels, but the hype must go on
Though I don’t want to steer if there’s opposition.
Thanks!

robosardine

@lukesleepwalker said:

@0tolerance4silence said:
How’s everything guys?
Don’t forget to keep us posted - maybe make the thread sticky?

Beta is going great. There were a few folks complaining about the chatter about the beta so I stopped posting here to be respectful to their concerns.

That’s great - it wasn’t me but I would fully back the sentiment behind it. I couldn’t stand to see endless chatter about it all - keep all the talk, if’s, but’s, maybes, hmmm, how about this?, man this is great, everyone will love 💕 it, I’ve found a bug.. but its only tiny, to yourselves until it’s released…. if that’s ok. I’m happy not to see it all, so if you can keep it to yourselves.. that would get my vote. Keep up the good work though! Your feedback is important.
And don’t forget - if it gets released with bugs that you didn’t spot - it’s down to you. Maybe you are punching above your weight and you had not truly earned this privileged position? - really should have spotted them - don’t be a slacker. Your identities are already known. The world needs your dedication at this difficult time…. don’t you be the one that didn’t see it. We don’t want to hear about ‘oooooohh I didn’t even think to try that!’. Now get to it.. and earn your corn!

0tolerance4silence

🙄
I see what you mean now

Liquidmantis

I'll be the voice of dissent. Obviously adhere to all, if there are any, NDA restrictions, but I love seeing what people are trying and how Loopy Pro is shaping up. It's also neat to see the workings of the good beta testers and how they come up with test scenarios and use cases.

celtic_elk

@Liquidmantis said:
I'll be the voice of dissent. Obviously adhere to all, if there are any, NDA restrictions, but I love seeing what people are trying and how Loopy Pro is shaping up. It's also neat to see the workings of the good beta testers and how they come up with test scenarios and use cases.

+1

ervin

@gregsmith said:

@audiobussy said:

@MarkR said:

@gregsmith said:

(snip)

I believe this KT Tunstall performance was instrumental (pun intended) in bringing looping to the mainstream in the UK. I remember lots of people talking about this performance as if it was some sort of magic.

Imogen Heap looped her way through this tune back in 2007. (Ah, the days of 240p resolution. lol)

This artist is new to me. Holy smokes

She’s fantastic.

I can recommend listening to Hide and Seek on headphones. Also, see if you can spot the sample 😉

Damn, you beat me to it. 👏🏻 So I now have to raise you her "musical gloves" instrument:

And as a bonus, here she comes doing Hide and Seek with the gloves

Science fiction. 😳 The general rule seems to be that she does everything way before you do and does it way better than you ever will 🤷

lukesleepwalker

@Liquidmantis said:
I'll be the voice of dissent. Obviously adhere to all, if there are any, NDA restrictions, but I love seeing what people are trying and how Loopy Pro is shaping up. It's also neat to see the workings of the good beta testers and how they come up with test scenarios and use cases.

Maybe we can find middle ground and post videos and hype type stuff but keep the beta chatter to slack (which is basically what happened so no big deal). Someone asked about the retrospective looping earlier so maybe we can knock out a video on that.

0tolerance4silence

Please do! I would also love to see LP AI in work when it comes to odd time signatures/less than perfect timing