Studying Robert Fripp and Steve Reich’s looping methods and translating some of it to my own experiments I’ve been working on an way to break out of my tendency for playing loops in the diatonic 4/4 inside a soundscape (Robert Fripp use of “soundscape” — not the sonic arts’ use). If I play in the Key of C-maj (Ionian) as an example, a phrase can be fed into a pitch shifter to obtain any of the chromatic pitches needed that fit the tuning schema of my instrument — depending on which varispeed I use, the ratios map nicely with chromatic intervals so (say) 3/2 original speed means a pitch shift of a 5th up, an F sharp, 4/3 original speed = a 4th up = B flat etc, which you can then overlay on top of the live-played diatonic tuned instrument. (It’s easier to get if you write it out as notation, but if you can read music its pretty obvious where I am going with this).
Now, the really cool bit is this approach doesn’t just change pitch, but also tempo; so if your loop originally is in two bars (in 5/4 example – that would be 10 4ths), after shifting it up a 4th, it becomes 10/(4/3rds) i.e. its in 15/8, but if you played a quarter note before, it becomes a dotted eight! Whacky time signatures like 15/8 are, if you clap through them quite easy to get:
So keeping it simple: a loop of 2/4 time can have a 3/4 measure dropped in at any point to really make things interesting
Loop 1: 2+2+2+3+2+2+2
Loop 2: 2+2+2+2+2+2+3
Loop 3: 2+3+2+2+2+2+2
…and so on.
One fun thing to do is to try layering a 5th or a 3rd to the previous loop’s fundamental on the 3-bar section. It has a dramatic density-adding quality to the rhythmic and harmonic quality of a soundscape. The whole thing does a skip then a lurch as it resolves off-kilter back in the 2/2 measure.
Need to hear something in 15/8? In Contemporary/modern pieces you’ll find it most famously used on “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield. The 15/8 opening is made of two bars: 7/8 then 8/8 — the 80′s output of “Perpetuum Mobile” by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is another good example as it is in 15/8, King Crimson are no strangers to 15/8 but layered on 4/4 on Discipline’s “Theela Hun Ginjeet” where the time signature of the band is 4/4, but Robert Fripp’s guitar plays in 7/8 and repeats until it loops back to the 4/4 measure — all pretty easy to grasp and I think its as a consequence of the effect of varispeed loops. This deserves deeper study… He certainly goes way way beyond Reich in this respect although Reich’s historical basis is not only tape loops but also Gamelan (which as it is not even-tempered is not really mapped easily to fourths guitar tuning) — but it becomes easier if I retune the instrument to perfect fifths + reciprocal inversions which the Chapman Stick can be, and in my case, is.
Paint me obvious but I say with a looper and has a eureka moment… a “how cool is this?” discovery… even if its been well-trodden by musicologists and Fripp and Reich fans. Its new to me and it’s a lesson that sunk in.
Getting back to the issues of perfect fourths versus fifths tuning, analysing Fripp (who has tuned his guitar to fifths aka the “New Standard Tuning”. i.e. CGDAEG — that last high G is a third BTW to resolve the interval of low G string to be an octave), he invariably builds up a basic soundscape layer this way. I’m starting with an original two-bar melody fed into the looper, varispeed it up to 4/3, and continue playing your original melody on your diatonic instrument – polyrhythm and chromatic tonality from a diatonic instrument at the same time! I’ll get a loop up on soundcloud in due course.
Building up in a loop is one thing but hacking back a beat at a time in a loop is rarely undertaken except played manually. I’d like to devise a looper that hacks off the last note of each barre after a measure so they go either out of sync or (more accurately) change time signatures: 5/8:5/8 becomes 5/8:4/4 becomes 5/8:9/8 15/16:15/16 then becomes 15/16:14/16 then10/8:20/16, and so on. Mathematically you can go through the progressions and the composition irrevocably and quite literally builds itself.
