Looping Boxes - Preparation and Use

Using effects with your instrument is tricky.   Use them too much and they become a non event making all your songs sound the same.    Use them improperly and you demonstrate to a paying audience why they should not come to see you again.    Today, I’m going to talk about using a looping box, which is a device that allows you to do sound  on sound recording, on the fly, live, while you are on stage.

There are a few things that you should do first, before you even plug the effect in.

First, get a drum machine and practice with it until you can make the beat seem like it’s slowing down (by playing a little ahead of the beat), speeding up (by playing a little behind the beat) and dead on (by playing right on the beat.)

I do this by putting songs I know at different tempos and learning to make them groove at that tempo.  Changing the tempo of a song you know forces you to pay very close attention to the tempo.   Once you have mastered this part, comes step two.

Get an on/off switch for your drum machine and plug it in.   Now play with the beat and then with your foot, punch the on/off switch and play with no drum machine for eight bars.  Now keeping time with your foot for the eight bars, you then punch the on/off switch right on the beat and see if you are playing in time with the drum machine.

The reason to do this, is to learn to keep great time with no metronome and to teach your foot to punch in at exactly the right time to keep the beat going smoothly.  Punch too soon or too late and you find that you have to adjust your playing to get back into the groove.

Do this until you are pretty consistent at maintaining the groove while punching in and out.

Now plug in the looping machine and play a four bar phrase.    When you are ready, punch in the looping box on  1 of the first bar and punch it out just before 1 of the fifth bar (which is the beginning of your repeat of the four bar phrase, you see?)

Now listen to what you’ve recorded. 

If it’s a steady groove then you’ve got it exactly right.   If it repeats the phrase a little early, then you’ve rushed the punch.   If it repeats the phrase a little late, then you have lagged behind when you should have punched out.

Do this as many times as it takes for you to learn exactly where and how hard to punch in and punch out your looping box.    When you have a smooth phrase, then it’s time for the next step.

And it gets much easier after you have learned to put in a phrase that is the exact length to make it a groove.   And a groove can be two beats, one bar, two bars, ten bars, whatever.   You choose.  

Now you have your groove and you begin to overdub or record sound or sound on top of what you’ve already recorded.

The trick here, is to choose a simple thing to record next.  Perhaps a back beat, or an ostenato (a repeated simple phrase of two to say four notes.  You can of course pick as many notes as you want, but we’re going for simple here).

Record that.  And if it sounds wrong, you can erase what you have done and re do it without affecting the orginal phrase that you recorded.   (At least you can on the Roland Looping Station that I work with by simple holding your foot down on the record pedal until the new part disappears and you are left with the original part still playing.)

By doing simple parts, it’s easy to over lay something that ends up sounding very complex.  Just remember you don’t want to do this to every song.  I  do it once in the middle of my set and it’s a simple loop.  Then at the end of my set, I do something complex—finale type stuff.

You can also just leave that groove going and overdub nothing on it.    And then play some extemporaneous leads over it.    Do it like outro on recordings, where they jam on something that they have distilled from the arrangement.

The key is getting your sense of time and tempo as good as you can get it and then learning how your looping box punches in.  Exactly where it begins to record and exactly where it punches out.  

One last tip.  Make certain that there is no carpet under the looping box,  as this will change the place in time where the record button engages.  This happens because the carpet will give a little and the whole looping box will go into the carpet until the carpet is compressed enough to act as a hard surface.

Comments

[Andy]

thanks for all those useful tips, I was playing a famous song "cialis levitra" by an unknown heavy metal band with my guitar and I had some trouble like the things you mentioned on here

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