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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! > How to Loop
How to Loop
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superchucker77
442 posts
May 21, 2014
3:45 PM
Here's a video that I uploaded today about the basics of using a looping pedal. It may be of interest to those of you who are wanting to experiment with looping pedals:


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Brandon O. Bailey
Official Website of Superchucker
Frank
4321 posts
May 21, 2014
4:08 PM
Thanks Brandon,

Slick as a pickle cured in a jar of motor oil...

Say that phrase fast 10 times :)
BronzeWailer
1276 posts
May 21, 2014
7:21 PM
I'll second Frank's thanks. Been waiting for something like this Brandon!

BronzeWailer's YouTube
nacoran
7756 posts
May 21, 2014
9:50 PM
Sometimes common sense isn't common! That would have thrown me for a loop (no pun intended, honest), although probably in the other direction. When I'm recording tracks in Audacity, since it's not going to be played back quite as quickly, I leave extra space at the end for everything to ring out (and so I don't make noise reaching for the mouse). I leave a lot of room in the beginning too, and try to use a count in, although I'm getting better timing it to the coming waveform on the screen.

The thing that always amazes me about loopers is when you've made the jump from building loops to play a song to playing a song and building loops as you go. My bands bass player, who is a top notch bass player, had a looper for a while, and he'd play a little snippet of something, then another, and eventually get it to sound like something, but he still played too many bars of that first, uninteresting part to keep people's attention, (in his defense, he only had it for about a month I think) and I've seen people torture the crowd with long loop building before they get to actually putting it together. Even some good acts, like DubFX, take a bit long to get things going. So my question is how do you mentally organize things to get things built quickly? I can lay down an entire song, and then go back and record something else over it, and I could probably work it down to 12 bars. How much building a track is overlapping- like, do you record a harp snippet, then a shaker on another track, then some beats on another, then vocals, or are you, after you record a harp snippet are you playing that back and rerecording it with your shaker, or keeping them on separate tracks, and if you aren't stopping them to record each track, are you isolating them to keep them from bleeding over?

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Gipsy
67 posts
May 21, 2014
11:31 PM
Thanks very much for that Brandon. Is there any chance you may be posting a few more " looping for dummies " type threads. It's something I've always fancied having a go at, but have only a hazy grasp on how to progress.
superchucker77
443 posts
May 21, 2014
11:33 PM
My theory behind building songs using looping is to keep everything as short and simple as possible. Thus, my beginning loop will generally only be a few bars (4 at the very max) of beatboxing or harmonica. Everything else that I record after that initial loop will be either that same length to build interest and complexity with the song, or shorter. The goal here is of course to keep everything as lively and interesting to your audience. I personally find doing long introductory loops to build up the song to be very irritating, thus why I don't do them.
It can further be helpful to build other phrases on different tracks if you have a multi track looper, however, I will often merge several phrases ( bassline/melody line) into one loop to keep with the continuity of the song.
In DubFX's case, usually when he is taking a long time to build up a loop, he does it with such style and finesse that the audience is so intrigued by what he is doing that they don't seem to mind that its taking him a long time.
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Brandon O. Bailey
Official Website of Superchucker
superchucker77
444 posts
May 21, 2014
11:34 PM
And yes, there will definitely be more videos and threads to come.
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Brandon O. Bailey
Official Website of Superchucker


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