Hello !
Today, I’m sharing with you the 1st improvisation of a long series of tracks that will be hosted directly on Substack (Should I call them “Substracks”) ?
As I said in my previous newsletter, each track will be available as a free download until the release of the next track.
The Download link for this track is HERE.
Liner notes about the track:
This improvisation is the 1st one I did after a 1+ year pause. It was recorded with a guitar and my voice, and also features some chords from a synth app at the beginning.
Loopy Pro (iPad app) is what I used for looping duties + some effect processing. I’m using an evolution of a template I’ve started to build before my 1 year hiatus.
The effect pedal rig was very new since I had just rebuilt it from scratch & was still very much experimenting with it.
I’ll give more details about both the looping & effect pedal rig in the next newsletters.
For now, I thought I’d do a Musical Improvisation + Live-Looping 101 & tell more about my approach of both.
I guess this might or might not be new or interesting to you (if it’s not, feel free to skip it: I won’t hold a grudge!) but I think it might be useful to share this so it exists on Substack for future reference.
What is Musical Improvisation ?
This how musical improvisation is defined on Wikipedia:
“Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians.”
Well… this is only the 1st definition, preceding several others, just on this Wikipedia article !
This is the thing with Improvisation: everybody knows what it is but it has vastly different implications depending on who you ask.
A DJ spinning records without a setlist & choosing what he will play next according to the crowd reactions is improvising. When a Dub producer is sending a pre-recorded track through live manipulated effects, muting & unmuting the different instruments, he is improvising too. So are Jazz musicians, meeting for the 1st time, and going on stage without a single idea of what they are about to play.
Describing improvisation is usually quite tricky but it’s also the very beauty of it: not two person will improvise in the same way because everything that makes the improviser is involved in how s/he views & does it!
And I don’t mean only the musical aspects such as the technical abilities on the instrument, the musical influences & tastes, and so on… I also includes the personal, cultural & political aspects too because the way someone improvise encompasses their very own place in & views of the world.
For example, my physical disability has a huge influence on the way I improvise. (A future post about how & how much it has influenced my music making & approach of instruments playing would probably be worthy to write)
Improvisation is one off those thing you have to experience, even as an audience member, to grasp what it’s all about when it come to a specific artist. Nobody will be able to accurately describe it for you: You just have to be there.
Improvisation is not a concept you can easily put it a box and stamp a (price) tag on, so you can sell it to thousands of costumers at a time. It’s not replicable, not sellable at a big scale, it hardly belong to the entertainment realm… which might be the best thing about it.
My own view of musical improvisation:
When I first began improvising as Le Principe d’Inconstance, I was the hardcore type: Improvisation meant playing with no idea of what I was going to play, no presets on the effect pedals, and even sometimes, it meant playing with my guitar tuned in a new way I was far from being familiar with…
This was cool & exciting at the beginning, but after a while, I noticed I was relying on the same tricks & falling in the same patterns.
What was once a challenge became comfort. Unlimited freedom became a trap.
Sure you can buy new effect pedals or change your guitar tuning again, and it can work… for a little while…
But the only durable way to avoid running in circles is to work on every aspect of your craft, try & learn new techniques and to adopt new perspectives. A good course of action to achieve this is to improvise with rules & limitations.
It might appear counterintuitive but…
To learn to improvise freely, you have to restrict your freedom.
Which can be quite fun if you take it like a game.
What if I improvise without using this pedal I’m using all the time ? What if I never play chords and only single notes ? What if I’m not allowed to play 2 consecutive notes on the same strings ? What if my fingers are not allowed to touch the strings at all ?
Those rules can be applied to anything: the way you’re playing your instrument, the way you are using your effects, the way you loop, the arrangement & structure of the piece… There is no end.
Preparing some things in advance can be part of that too. If you decide on a chord progression beforehand, one you have never played over or one that will force you to play in a scale that is new to you, it will make you play in a new way.
This is pretty much what I intent to do from now on: Improvising with rules, limitations or by following some ideas / process I want to explore, so I can go wider & deeper in order to make real long-lasting progress.
What is Live-Looping ?
If you look online, you will probably find very different definitions of what live-looping is. Artists whose practice is based on this technique pretty much agree on what it is but it’s often misunderstood by people who are not immersed in it.
This is how I define it:
Live-looping is the process of recording, in real-time, sounds (from an instrument/microphone) in a device called a looper, that will immediately play back the recording infinitely in a loop.
This is the very basic, technical, definition. The “recording in real-time” being the core aspect & the whole point: It is what sets live-looping apart from “playing live with pre-recorded loops”, even when the playback of those loops is done in real-time. Arranging the pre-recorded loops live doesn’t make it “live-looping” to me.
I feel compelled to insist on this point because there are a lot of confusion about this.
To this basic definition I’ll add that:
The art of live-looping includes the many different ways to record, alter, modify & arrange the loops.
This is what can make a looper an instrument in itself, and live-looping an artform.
Despite (or should I say “because”) the fact that live-looping has been hugely democratized in the past 15 years, the possibilities of transforming the loops once there are recorded is a very seldom known aspect of it.
Why ?
Because most hardware loopers, those that are purchased & used by the average musician, bear very little functions outside the basic Record, Play, Overdub. It’s usually possible to play the loop in reverse, sometimes you can play it in half-time/one octave below the original pitch, but this is pretty much it.
The average hardware loopers are so limited that most can do less than what were available to the pioneers in the 70s !
A screaming example is the absence of a “feedback” function.
I won’t give a live-looping history lesson here (check this page if you’d like to now more about it) but a looper is basically a specific type of delay. A delay will record an input signal to a storage medium and then plays it back after a period of time, thus creating an echo effect. The delayed signal may be played back multiple times, or fed back into the recording, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo. On a delay effect, the function that allows to chose the number of repeats is commonly called “Feedback”.
A looper, is a (long) delay with a feedback set at 100%.
One of the pioneer of live-looping is King Crimson’s guitarist Robert Fripp. In the 70s he created what he called Frippertronics: a way to create soundscapes by looping his guitar on tape machines used as very long delays. Whatever he played was repeated later at a lower volume and with a degraded sound quality (due to the imperfect nature of the tapes), which allowed him to create haunting and spiraling pieces.
To achieve this with a modern looper, you’d have to set its feedback level to less than 100%… That is IF it features this function, which is rarely the case on massively produced loopers.
I’ll probably go deeper about this in future posts but for now, let’s just say that this “Feedback” setting provides many other means to change the way you can record & transform a loop. With this function only, you can turn something that can be quickly boring to something changing, surprising and exciting!
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At its core, Live-looping is a very vertical way of making music: you pile up sounds on top of other sounds. The possibilities are quite limited.
Having other functions at our disposal, functions that are very common on other sample-based devices (Samplers, MPCs & grooveboxes), allows one to use live-looping in an horizontal way. Things can evolve from point A to point Z: one can build an arrangement & tell a story, even when using a single instrument and a single looper.
Don’t get me wrong: loopers with advanced functions do exist. There are a few hardware ones, and way more in the software world. But since the most sold loopers are basic, barely anyone knows about those extra possibilities & “live-looping” became synonym with “boring, loopy music”.
It doesn’t have to be!
My approach of (non-linear) live-looping improvised performances.
So we have a tool that is supposed to be quite restricted (live-looping) in a practice that promises to be unlimited (improvisation).
The game for me is to find ways to expand this limited tool, to push its limits so I create enough freedom to tell what I want to express.
After years of doing this, I came to realize that you can always find news ways to push limits & that what you think as unlimited is actually quite constrained.
I learned that perspective is everything and, even if not all boundaries are good to cross, being aware of what they are and challenging them is a great way to learn & grow. It’s all a balancing act, and a very empowering act.
I’m happy with an improvisation when I feel I was able to “go somewhere”: it has to have some structure. But I also want to be surprised by what occurred: There’s no greater feeling than not remembering or understanding how a specific part or sound appeared. You know it all comes from you but it doesn’t seem so…
All the choices I makes in regards to the looping rig, effects & instruments are done to pursue this: Everything must be clear & simple enough so I can master them enough to be able to achieve what I want in the moment without too much hesitation. It also has to have a part that escapes me, that is prone to beautiful consequences & happy accidents…
What & how I made those choices will be the focus of the next newsletters, starting with the looping rig.
Until next time, Stay curious!
koyl
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