TO LOOP OR NOT TO LOOP
Using a guitar looper can be a surprisingly divisive topic among professional working musicians. Some claim it is cheating and some claim it is a perfectly necessary, or at least a very beneficial, tool to have in the tool kit.
In this chapter I would like to
- Clarify just What “Looping” is, and help you determine whether it is right for you.
- Talk about the logistical benefits of using a guitar looper in a corporate setting or at a wedding.
- Walk through the basics of how to properly use a guitar looper, including some more creative applications.
- Review features of a guitar looper that help make your job easier
- Provide a link to my review of the top 5 best loopers out there. If you want to skip straight to that review. No problem! You can do that here REVIEW OF TOP 5 BEST LOOPERS
Some of you may have never heard of a guitar looper, some of you may be total experts on using them and many of you are probably somewhere in between! If you are further toward the “Expert” end of the spectrum feel free to skip down to Creative Applications and Reviews! (Though if you do skip down, you’re going to miss a whole bunch of drummer jokes)
WHAT THE HECK IS A GUITAR LOOPER AND SHOULD I BE USING ONE?
In its simplest form, and for the purpose of live performance, a guitar looper is a pedal that records a musical phrase as you play it (think of the 3 chords of Knockin on Heaven’s Door) and plays it back to you over and over again.
You define the “IN” point, or when the recording begins, and the “OUT” point or when the recording stops. The OUT point is also the point at which the beginning of the recorded phrase starts playing again. This phrase will play on “loop” until you STOP the loop. In a live setting this gives you a chance to rest your weary voice and do some soloing over the top of the music bed.
You have basically just cloned yourself and forced your clone to play rhythm guitar while you play lead. Pretty neat trick! Now if we can only figure out how to do that with drummers… Just kidding drummers! 🙂
RANDOM BITS OF KNOWLEDGE: While it makes intuitive sense that something that repeats would be called “looping” (for the same reasons that circular thinking is called circular thinking) the real reason that a looper is called a “looper” is that it is mimicking a physical loop of tape. In the old days when we used to use 2” (and to a lesser degree 1” and ½”) tape and tape machines. We could physically cut the tape at a starting point and an ending point and use (adhesive) tape to tape the tape back together (is that enough “tapes” for ya?). With some slight modification to the path of the recording tape on the machine (to adjust to this new abnormal length) you could play this new “loop” of tape indefinitely much like you can now with our loopers.
Prince was famous for playing the drums himself for a song, capturing the best 4 bars, setting up the loop on one tape machine and then recording that multitrack loop straight over to another tape machine, turning the 4 bars into 16 for a verse, and doing the same with a different loop for the 16 bars of a chorus. Dude was a genius.
So perhaps you are now asking yourself “should I be using a guitar looper?” As with so many things the answer is…it depends.
If you are a classical guitar player or a flamenco guitar player or any other sort of instrumentalist who’s talent lies in your ability to create multi facetted, complex and interesting music with nothing more than your guitar and your fingers, having a pedal board with effects and loopers may be unnecessary and cumbersome. Sometimes the addition of technological aids can take away from the purity of a simple instrumental performance. Likewise, some of these performers have the unique benefit of carting around nothing more than a guitar and a small amp for their instrument. As we discussed in chapter 3, the convenience of an easy set up when playing multiple gigs a week can not be overvalued.
I wish I was a talented enough player to do everything I need to do on the fretboard alone, but I, like so many other players, rely on some combination of playing, singing, song choice and technology. And that’s OK too!
The end game is to be able to provide a professional music experience for your clients and a fully committed performance for the audience. There are many ways to achieve those goals.
BENEFITS
As you have likely gathered by now I personally am fully bought-in to the use of guitar looper pedals. I consider my looper pedal to be an integral part of the service I provide as a musician.
There are a number of really cool and creative ways to use loopers that not only sound great but also keep me engaged and feeling creative as I play. But before we touch on those, let’s consider some of the more basic benefits that this piece of gear provides.
#1 Guitar Loopers give you a chance to break up the music and rest your voice.
3 Hours is a long time to play. It is an even longer time to sing. And I would say that fully 10-15% of my gigs are 4 hour gigs (if you’re a drummer, that means that it’s an even longer time to have to play and sing. Kidding drummers!)
Barring your breaks you need to be playing that whole time. When starting out, this may or may not be a strain on your voice, your hands or your catalog of songs. But if you are being CONSIDERATE of your surroundings you will recognize that the most important thing is that it can be a strain on the attendees. Even though you may be background music for the event, these folks will be listening to the same person, same style of play, same voice, same phrasing, etc for quite a long time. Thats a lot of YOU and the way that YOU perform music.
Even if you are the most refreshing talent on the scene, 3 or 4 hours can be a long time for someone who’s not already familiar with your work to listen to you. It is therefore your responsibility to help break this time up and keep it interesting.
In the next chapter we will discuss how, despite you being background music, attendees at these events are subconsciously quite in tune with and listening to you. They may not even be aware that there is a musician there playing, but you can watch them physically react to small mistakes you make or lulls in your set, without even being aware of it. One of the things that you can see them most clearly affected by is sonic fatigue, or simply tiring of hearing the same thing for a long period of time.
Fortunately there are a number of ways to combat this before it becomes a problem. One way is to be CONSIDERATE when organizing your set list and breaks. We’ll talk about that in Chapter 5.
But another is to utilize the looper as a way to make individual songs, and thus your set as a whole, more dynamic. By inserting instrumental motifs or solos into every couple songs, you give the listener something new and fresh in their ear hole.
I once hired a friend of a friend to play a birthday party for my Dad. She had quite a nice voice and a decent catalog of songs, but from the moment she sat down she was grinding out Verse – Chorus- Verse – Chorus – Bridge – Chorus on each song. She never took a break! And by the 120 minute mark, despite her nice voice I could tell that everyone there was sonically fatigued. Just a small instrumental break on a couple songs (or even a 10 minute ipod break) would have done wonders to let everyone re-calibrate and to be able to enjoy the remainder of her set.
Too much of anything is too much of it. Unless you’re my wife and you are talking about ice cream. She is adamant that there simply is no such thing as “too much” ice cream.
#2 A guitar looper helps fill space.
There are many events that will ask that you begin playing before the first guest arrives and throughout as the guests slowly trickle into the venue. One of the things you should be CONSIDERATE of is keeping an appropriate psychological space between you and the event goers. You are not a guest of the party, but nor are you serf, you should consider yourself a valued portion of the atmosphere.
If you were hired to provide background music, you should provide background music and not try to be the welcoming party (more on this in chapter 5’s section on DEMEANOR). That said, it can be quite awkward, for you and the guests, when 1 or 2 (or a small handful of) guests arrive and you are there singing your heart out to a completely empty space.
While you are not the welcoming party, you likely know more about the event than the guests do, so it possible that they will want to ask you where the restrooms are, or if there is an ATM so they can get cash for tips at the bar, or they may just want to say hello to you or at least acknowledge that you are there. We are human beings after all, and to come into contact with another human being but to somehow avoid acknowledging them is extremely awkward…elevators; case in point!
Any prickliness in the above scenarios is easily smoothed over if you start your set, prior to any guests arriving, by recording a few nice chords on the looper and then just noodle around playing little guitar bits over the top of it.
As people start to show up to the empty venue they can say hello and your mouth won’t be glued to the microphone, so you can give them a proper smile, head nod, mouth hello back, whatever is comfortable. Or as the looper continues on, you can actually lift your hand and give a quick wave in the middle of the ”song”. If someone comes up and asks you where the bathroom is you can point them in the right direction without an abrupt halt to the music. These small gestures may seem insignificant an unworthy of discussion, but I assure you it takes but one or two people who are truly appreciative of your help and impressed by your ability to keep music playing in the midst of your help that will say the right things to the right people and get you locked into an annual gig with a company.
Another possibility is the CEO wanting to thank you for being there. Maybe he or she wants to show a couple of his or her employees that he or she is hip and cool with the musician. That’s an almost guaranteed attempted handshake…while you are playing. One that you can actually accomplish if you have a loop set up. Surprisingly, this happens ALL the time.
You would think that they would see your hands playing the guitar and they would hear the music coming out of the speakers and think to themselves, well this guy is actually playing that music with those hands, so there is no way I can (or should) reach out for a handshake, because surely that would disrupt the music I am hearing… Nope. a shocking number of people just jut that hand right on out there like the music plays itself. …so let the music play itself 🙂
The last bit on filling space with the looper is that as you are building up your repertoire you may not have 3 hours of solid music, let alone 4. So knowing that you always have the ability to throw some chords down and solo over the top of them is a pretty nice security blanket.
FUN WITH MATH:
A set that is 4 hours = 240 minutes – 40 min (10 minute break /hour) = 200 minutes of playing time = 50 songs (@4 minutes a song).
Add just 16 bars of solo to every song (@ 100 bpm) thats 42.6 seconds/song or 35 minutes worth of extra music (@4minutes a song) your set just dropped from 50 songs to 42 songs! …which technically changes the amount of time we are soloing, soooo…Uh oh, its a loop!!! But you get the idea!
#3 It can save you in a pinch
Like that handshake from the CEO, it is the unknown that is hardest to deal with when you are playing live. One of the cardinal sins of this industry is to let the proverbial needle screech off the proverbial record player and have your music come to an abrupt and noticeable stop. This should be avoided at (almost) all costs.
Children playing around your speakers, your mic stand starting to slip and lean over, you noticing that your b-string is actually pretty darn out of tune, your song book is turned to the wrong page, that glass of wine someone unknowingly just put down on your PA system… all of these things need to be addressed relatively immediately. But if you are just starting the first verse of a song, it is a real buzzkill to suddenly stop to address these things. If you happened to set a loop at the beginning of the song, or are able to throw together a quick loop (even briefly holding on one chord) before addressing the issue, you can fix the problem without it ever being noticed by the attendees at large.
BASIC USE AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF A GUITAR LOOPER PEDAL
Let’s look at the Basic Use of a Guitar Looper and More advanced uses of the Looper.
#1 Basic Use
Operation of individual pedals may vary slightly based on the particular model of looper you are using, but most pedals have at least similar basic functionality.
Check out this video tutorial to see a looper in action
As discussed above there is an IN point and an OUT point when creating a loop. Practically speaking, as soon as you step on the pedal it begins recording your guitar. When the pedal is engaged a second time, the recording stops, defining the end of the loop, and the loop immediately starts from the beginning. Depending on the looper, there is then either an additional pedal or a way of manipulating the main pedal (ie a double kick) to STOP the loop
As you can imagine, it is extremely important that the timing on both the IN and the OUT are dead on. Even a slight mistake on either side will make the loop sound wrong (like a bad edit), and as you can imagine that mistake will be heard everytime the loop cycles.
To ensure that your loops are tight and on time, avoid trying to start a loop from a cold start. In other words, start playing through a cycle of the song’s chords and wait until the second time around, once you have established a consistent tempo, to try and kick into the “IN” point. It obviously makes the most sense to start the loop on “the 1” (or first beat) of the song.
Just for the sake of argument, you could conceivably set your looper to go IN at literally any point in the phrase, and as long as you define your OUT in the exact same place, the loop will be true and capture the full chord progression. But there is no benefit to doing that and the down side is huge. If you were to punch IN at bar 3 beat 2 of any given phrase, that means you would need to punch OUT at bar 3 beat 2 as well, but the real tricky part would be that if you STOP the loop, play live a little and then want to bring the loop back in, you have to remember that it was on bar 3 beat 2 executing that IN will feel way less natural than doing so on the “1”.
PRO TIPS:
1) Always use “the 1” (Bar 1 Beat 1) as your “IN” point and “OUT” point. I don’t know of a good reason not to do that. If you think of one please write me and let me know!
2) Most of us are not as perfect with our timing as we may think we are, so playing into and out of the loop helps keep the loop feeling natural.
#2 Practical Application
Once we master the creation of clean IN and OUT points, thus creating clean loops, how do we practically use these loops in any given song?
Here is what I like to do, let’s take a song like Knockin on Heaven’s Door which only has 4 chords in the Verse. Play through the series of chords once at the top of the song, play the series a second time but click the looper into record (or “IN”) on the “1”, play through the 4 chord progression and click OUT on the 1 as the looper goes into the 3rd time round on the chord series (remembering to play through the OUT for smoothness), but by the 2 or 3rd bar of this 3rd time through the progression you are now able to do a little soloing over the chords.
Particularly as background music, it feels very natural to have a little solo at the top of a song.
Once you have exhausted the solo section (generally 16 -24 bars is about all you should do before it gets monotonous), you will want to cleanly STOP the loop so that you will be playing the chord progression live again. And just as you were playing as you set the IN to the loop record, and played OUT of the loop record, so should you play through any loop STOP for smoothness. In other words, don’t try to solo up to the last note and then suddenly try to hit that first chord of the progression which the loop will no longer be playing. Instead, fade your solo out a few bars before the loop will end and play along with the chords as you go to STOP the loop to make it more seamless.
Once you play through the STOP, you are live again. I am a firm believer that singing your verses and choruses sound most natural if you are playing live with them. Singing over your loop can work for certain songs, particularly if you are now free to play little guitar phrases to compliment your singing. But simply relying on the looper to be your backing track because you are too lazy to play is a no no.
CREATIVE USE OF A GUITAR LOOPER PEDAL
Even more than with the basic utilization of the looper, using the looper for creative purposes will really depend on the features of your particular looper and what kinds of bells and whistles it has. Some have multiple inputs, some have discrete control of a number of loops simultaneously while some are a simple push the button to start the loop and again to play the loop system.
If you have a good looper, that you are comfortable with, there really are unlimited possibilities. Let’s look a 4 different ways to get loopy in order of complexity. From most simple to most complex
#1 Stacking guitar parts
This is just what you might expect. Most loopers will allow you to stack as many loops as you want. Stacking means to record new parts on top of old parts without erasing any old parts, such that you are building a more and more complex soundscape.
From a execution standpoint, after you click IN to record and click OUT to set your first loop, the looper can then record and layer all subsequent passes. Some loopers will automatically go back into record mode after setting the OUT, some will require that you click back into record again. But either way, you then have the ability to layer endless numbers of passes.
Bear in mind that your guitar and cables and pedals and even the PA itself (collectively called the signal chain) all make some amount of undesirable noise in the form of slight hums and buzzes. As you stack loops, the noise of anything that is plugged in prior to the looper will be being multiplied with every pass along with your program. Just something to be aware of as you start layering 5,6,7 or more passes.
#2 Inputting other instruments, vocal mics and rhythm tracks
Other Instruments
This is sort of a more complicated version of playing guitar solos over a basic rhythm guitar track. The Boss RC-30 which is what I use, allows 1 standard guitar input, 1 alternative Instrument Input as well as one Microphone (XLR) Input. This allows for the inclusion of any instrument you want, for my purposes I like adding a piano, I use a KORG SV-2 specifically. You can easily lay down piano chords along with your guitar chords to give the music bed another dimension. Add in a couple little phrases or motifs to the loop on the piano and then get back to soloing over this lush bit of music.
Another option here is to set a loop for the chorus of a song on guitar, back those chorus chords up with piano. Once this 2 instrument chorus loop is in the looper, you can STOP the loop and play the verses of the song on guitar. General music production dictates that verses are more empty than choruses, so bringing the song down to just guitar for verses and then bringing the loop back in to fill out the choruses will feel very natural. Any soloing you want to do will likely work well over this built up chorus loop as well.
Vocal Mics
It is hard to talk about looping without mentioning Edward Sheehan. His use of a vocal mic and his creation of rhythm tracks is nothing short of amazing. Check out THIS LINK to a video of his 2 sold out nights at Wembley Stadium. Playing SOLO acoustic, just him, his mini acoustic guitar and a looper, to 70,000 people each night.
The basic idea of the vocal mic being connected to the looper is the same as with the guitar. The beauty here is that your voice is an extremely versatile instrument. If using the looper to accomplish the above example of a Chorus Only Loop, you can sing harmony or back up parts through the chorus loop that will come in when you kik into the chorus. This works best with short repeating choruses so that you don’t need to make the loop too long.
Another common use is to create a Rhythm track vocally, like beat boxing but without having to create all the sounds at the same time. A deep chesty “UH” and a percussive “AH” can work wonderfully as faux kick and snares respectively. Layer with those Uhs and Ahs some muted strumming to mimic a hi hat track and we can essentially get rid of drummers all together! Kidding!! Some of my very favorite people in the world are drummers. And their inability to count hasn’t hampered our friendship whatsoever.
#3 Creating percussive rhythm tracks with Guitar
I’ll be honest, I have never been good at this, partially because I end up going the beat box route most of the time. But lots of solo acoustic guitar players do it to great effect all the time. Ed Sheeran being one of the true masters here.
This is generally accomplished by thumping on the body of the guitar. Often folks will use an open palm of the hand on the meaty part of front of the main body of the guitar to make a lower thuddier sound (again to mimic a kick drum) and a snappier hit with their fingers closer to the side of the guitar (to mimic a snare). Some folks will also wrap their fingertips in succession on the main body of their guitar (think of an evil genius deep in thought wrapping his finger tips in succession on the arm of his evil thrown.. or HER evil thrown, i don’t want to be sexist with my villains!). Like the muted strumming, this can be done in ⅛, 1/16th, or even 1/32nd notes to mimic a high-hat.
#4 Setting Unique Verse, Chorus and Bridge Parts
The most complex version of the looper’s utility is to use it to build full discrete verse, chorus and bridge parts where each of those parts are made up of different chord progressions. This is really only possible with a looper like the boomerang, the VFX Boome or Ed Sheeran’s Chewie II. The key here is of course that your equipment has multiple pedals representing discrete loops, and that there is a way for them to function in series such that starting one loop (say your chorus loop) will automatically STOP another loop (say your verse loop).
While this gives you the ability to create lush full sounding songs otherwise impossible as a solo acoustic guitar player, it comes at the cost of taking the time to set each one of those loops up.
These are always value propositions, is the payoff worth the cost? This is for you to decide.
That was a long chapter, but I hope you got some useful information out of it!
How bout we take a little break and you can enjoy the mastery of some really great musicians in the following videos of really cool complex loop set ups.
We’ll dive back into it with some of my favorite corporate event set lists in the next chapter!