Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.
I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):
Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.
Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. (I own one and am obsessed with it.) “Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.
Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.
Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.
On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.
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