Live looping

You know about live looping right? Using a device, a loopstation or a laptop so you can overdub yourself playing. I have briefly experimented with this myself in the past using my guitar and Ableton Live on a MacBook Pro. The Looper device of Live is a great tool for creating all sorts of loops on the fly. The challenges are chords changes because the more complex your songs are, the harder it will be to use the Looper for that. But it’s possible.

Here’s an old video which was recorded in my old living room by Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat aka Punkmedia. I was only fooling around a bit with the Looper when Henk-Jan was setting up his video equipment for an interview with me. I looped my guitar and dropped a few audio files of old interviews in Ableton and started to manipulate them in real time.

It’s all in Dutch but I think you’ll get the idea:

Marco Raaphorst | sounddesigner from punkmedia on Vimeo

And some years ago I did a session with Steven Kruyswijk for a live audience which was talking loudly and drinking heavily. Again using Ableton Live for looping my guitar parts and for the drum loops. Check:

At the moment I’m arranging guitar parts for a new live project together with Tom America. Maybe I will introduce a bit of live looping in this project, but at the moment I’m not sure about it. The songs are rather complex with a lot of chords changes and we will be using a beamer so everything needs to be synced to these images/videos. It will be rather complicated that way. Finding new ways to perform live is one of the things we’re trying to achieve but at the same time we’re aiming for simplicity.

We’ll see…