I’ve been a non-professional, or occasionally “semi-pro” guitar player for over 25 years now (ouch!). I’ve played in all kinds of bands - from cover/dance bands to an all-original punk rock band. But, since the first time I heard Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s landmark “No Pussyfooting” LP, I have always been intrigued… no, make that obsessed… with the concept of live looping. I’ll explain a little more about what live looping really is later in this post.

This blog topic will be devoted to a series of articles about live looping, my personal experiences, and some of the knowledge I’ve acquired on the subject over the last 5 or 6 years. Once I get my home recording situation worked out, I’ll also include audio clips either illustrating concepts or just showing off The purpose of these articles is to help others who might be interested in live looping by sharing some of my own learnings and techniques, and to expose the reader to other live looping artists.

So, let’s start this one out with some basics:

What is live looping?

Live looping is a term that refers to capturing live audio, as it is performed, and looping that audio as a component of a live performance. This distinguishes live looping from the concept of playing pre-recorded material, one-shot samples, or other forms of traditional studio sampling work. The performer starts with a clean slate, and builds one or more (sometimes many more!) loops from the immediate material they play.

It can be argued that “looping”, or repetition, as a music composition technique is as old as music itself. Almost all cultures create music that feature a strong sense of structure through repetition, especially rhythmic repetition and commonly, melodic repetition. Again, the distinction for live looping is that the repeated material is captured immediately, at the time of it’s creation, and replayed immediately as part of the composition.

Capturing audio material at the time of performance is at once ultimate freedom, and potential hazard. The performer can decide at any point what sounds to capture and loop, yet those decisions are relatively immediate and irreversible. If you decide to loop a phrase and you “screw it up”, that screw-up becomes part of the live material. There are some ways to mitigate this hazard (with techniques like “Undo”), but we’ll cover those in a future post. Suffice it to say that live looping presents a whole new set of challenges and opportunities to the performing artist, beyond those always present in traditional live performance.

Who “invented” live looping

Now there’s a question that’s likely to cause some debate. Without a detailed treatise on the advancement of recording technologies, and the various communities of artists across the globe who were involved in those advancements, it would be impossible to provide a clear picture of just who and how live looping became a performance technique. For this simple little blog post, I’ll simply say that the early incarnations of live looping probably came from extensions of the pioneering work done by minimalist composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Various artistic communities and collectives adopted and extended the things that Riley and Reich were doing with live tape loops in the 1960’s. Probably the most often cited example of “modern” live looping was the 1972-73 Fripp/Eno experiment, later released as “No Pussyfooting”. Fripp and Eno used two reel-to-reel tape machines to simultaneously record and playback audio from a single, physical tape loop which ran through both machines. The resulting approach was later dubbed “Frippertronics” by Robert Fripp, and showcased by Fripp throughout the 70’s and 80’s. Fripp has since moved his live looping to digital technologies, and re-termed the work “Soundscapes” - but the techniques are quite similar to the original pioneering work of the 70s.

What equipment can you use to accomplish live looping?

In it’s simplest form, live looping can be accomplished with a simple delay device. Sending live audio into a “delay line”, and allowing that audio to repeat as part of your performance is live looping in it’s most fundamental form. There are still a lot of artists who use this simple technique today. There are also the techniques mentioned above - dual tape player/recorders operating on a single loop of tape. However, delay and sampling technologies have advanced significantly in the last 15 years, and there are a number of dedicated or semi-dedicated looping devices available on the open market.

The most popular mass-market loopers are:

• Line 6 DL-4
• Boomerang Phrase Sampler
• Boss RC-20 Loop Station
• Akai Headrush
• Boss DD-20 Giga Delay
• Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro
• TC Electronic 2290 Digital Delay

There are many more live looping devices available. This list is by no means comprehensive. For more information on these and other looping tools, try looking at the Looper’s Delight website, specifically the “Tools of the Trade” section.

Well, that’s a good start on explaining what I mean by “live looping”. My fingers and my brain are tired, and I’m inspired to go do a little looping myself!, so I’ll sign off on this post. In future articles I’ll begin to explain some of the basic and advanced techniques that I and others use to accomplish live looping, and some of the issues that come up when using live looping in a band context.

If any of you are actually still reading this, shoot me a comment about what you’d like to hear relative to live looping, and I’ll make sure that I address it.

Loop on!