The recent visits to see Robert Fripp perform have been very inspirational. Hearing the music in the proper context had a profound impact on me and I still stick to my judgement that performing Soundscapes in a rock context (i.e. in front of a boozed up, jaded and cynical audience expecting balls-out rock and roll) is like throwing your pearls to the swine.
Anyway, I’ve been noodling about with looped music for a quite a while – since about 1994 when I got my first guitar synthesizer, the Roland GR-1. Again, hearing Fripp made me realise just how much one can miss a piece of equipment. In those days, I didn’t have any delay or loop devices to help me get the sound I wanted. A delay pedal is a piece of equipment that basically acts as an electronic echo and duplicates the sound played into it, gradually decaying over time – The Edge from U2 is the biggest exponent of the delay pedal I can think of. A loop pedal is a bit more complicated and just plays back whatever you put into it and you can overdub sounds on top of that.
But I had neither, so I came up with a novel way of achieving my own soundscapes. What I would do is create a sound on my Roland GR-1, usually based on a string pad, and make sure that the decay of the sound was really long, so that when you plucked the string, the sound would continue for ages before dying out. This way I could play long deep notes and try and solo/add melody with the higher pitched strings on my guitar. The earliest example of this was a track called “Angel’s Tears” and actually it used a Yamaha MU-50 as the sound source, so it has a rather unique sound to it. Here it is:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Over the years, I’ve purchased delay pedals such as the Line 6 DL-4 and the Boss DD-20 digital delay pedals, both of which allow you about 20 seconds of stereo looping time. With equipment like that, you can set down some synth pad noises and solo over the top. They are quite effective and work well despite not really being looping devices. Such examples of the DL-4 and DD-20 can be heard in this next piece, Shard of Indecision:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Since then, true looping pedals have come to the fore and I’ve been using a Boss RC-20XL. Despite being only a mono device, you have an awful lot of delay time to play with (around 50 minutes, I think) and the sound quality is superb for such a compact device. I’ve been salivating over the new Boss RC-50, which is a stereo looper, but alas, I have neither the space nor the money to purchase one. But I’m not bitter, I am making the most of what I’ve got.
I think looped improvisation is a really interesting musical form and, for me anyway, it gives me the ability to tap into my subconscious creative mind. Once you set things off, you don’t really know where you are going to head and it is both nerve-wracking and extremely liberating at the same time. Seeing Robert Fripp perform with his banks of equipment was a real inspiration and it gave me the metaphorical kick up the rump to go back to my pedals and get playing. This morning I came up with this live improvisation called Cloistered Spaces 1, inspired by my visit to Norwich Cathedral yesterday. It’s not particularly good as I’ve not been ‘scaping for a while, but it is a start:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
The Missus quite enjoys my ambient noodling and reckons I should try and play this kind of stuff live. I always reply that if RF has such a hard time of it whenever he fires up a soundscape, what chance have I got. You’ve got to admire her blind faith, haven’t you?