Tape loop
Encyclopedia
In music
, tape loops are loops
of prerecorded magnetic tape
used to create repetitive
, rhythm
ic musical patterns or dense layers of sound
. Contemporary composers such as Steve Reich
and Karlheinz Stockhausen
used tape loops to create phase
patterns and rhythms. Terry Riley
originally employed the technique of tape looping in the 1950s; later producing such pieces as "Music For the Gift" (1963) and "Bird of Paradise" (1964) and culminating in his use of two tape recorder
s (collectively described by Riley as the "Time Lag Accumulator") in live solo performances to create long delays, during which he would play both saxophone and organ, as heard on the album Reed Streams (1966) and the piece "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" (on the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air
). In 1973, musicians Brian Eno
and Robert Fripp
used an entirely similar idea to make the album No Pussyfooting; Robert Fripp later coining the term "Frippertronics
" to describe this process pioneered by Terry Riley
. In the mid-1980s, digital sampling
overtook much tape loop use. In the 1990s and 2000s, digital looping pedal
s became more affordable. One-man band
s use looping pedals to record a groove or riff, and then they solo over the riff as it repeats.
machine. Tape loop effects are sometimes combined with a technique wherein the playback speed of the loop is increased or decreased over time, somewhat similar to a glissando
which slurs the pitch of a note up or down as used in music.
Simultaneous playing of tape loops to create phase patterns and rhythms was developed and initially used by musique concrète
and tape music
composers, and was most extensively utilized by Steve Reich
for his "phasing
" pieces such as "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain", and by Karlheinz Stockhausen
.
The length of the loop, of course, controlled the length of the repeated sound, combined with the desired content of the composer. On a standard reel-to-reel, one could loop, at most, a few seconds of music or sound. Some composers were satisfied with this approach, but there were other methods to allow for longer loops. For example, one could place two reel-to-reel machines side by side and string the tape between them, using one machine for playback and the other simply as a pulley for the length of tape. By using this or other methods, some composers could create very long loops which allowed for lengthier fragments of sound. When recording his landmark 1978 ambient
album Music for Airports
, Brian Eno
reported that for a particular song, "One of the tape loops was seventy-nine feet long and the other eighty-three feet." (Prendergrast, 123)
Alternatively, one tape machine could be a playback machine while the second machine was a recording machine, creating not a tape loop, strictly speaking, but an extremely long echo.
began using tape loops to add special effects to some BBC programming. Rock
musicians, most notably The Beatles
, Frank Zappa
, Daevid Allen
(who learned directly from Terry Riley
, and has created entire pieces from tape loops throughout his career), Soft Machine
(who learned from Daevid Allen), Fifty Foot Hose
, Can
, and Pink Floyd
, have used tape loops on their album
s.
One of the more novel uses of tape loops were heavily utilized by French electronic pop composer Jean Jacques Perrey (sometimes working with American composer Gershon Kingsley) on a series of mid-60s albums on the Vanguard label. Their loops often had tight, multiple splices in them to create their frantic rhythmic loop effects, to which they added conventional instruments and synthesizers playing generally familiar instrumental up-tempo tunes. Their composition, "Baroque Hoedown", from their 1967 album, "Kaleidoscopic Vibrations" was adopted by Disney for their "Starlight Parade" event at Disneyland and Disneyworld, and was used by filmmaker Mike Jittlov
for the "Mouse Mania" animated short film he made for Disney's Mickey Mouse 50th anniversary TV special in 1978.
In the early 1970s, musicians Brian Eno
and Robert Fripp
utilized the techniques pioneered by Terry Riley
in the 60s. In 1974 a new musical instrument called a Birotron
was invented using tape loops from 8 track tapes. It offered the promise of the mainstream embracing tape loop music. A few years later, Mission of Burma
began using loops on their albums, and also began feeding snippets of vocals and guitar recorded moments earlier back into their live mix, thereby introducing live loop effects to punk rock
. Experimental
noise music
ian NON aka Boyd Rice
played loops of speeches, radio broadcasts and conversations just under the threshold of comprehensibility in his live shows, starting in 1977. Since then, he's created loops to evoke a hypnotic, trance state in his audiences.
-- which can generally provide similar results with less effort—overtook much tape loop use, beginning in the mid 1980s. To create a loop digitally requires nothing more than highlighting a section of already-recorded music or sound and clicking on a 'repeat' or 'duplicate' icon as many times as you want the loop to repeat. Some musicians and composers, however, continue to use analog tape loops for various reasons.
A noteworthy example of this melodic layering effect is Ian Williams
' dense, complex layers of guitar on Don Caballero
's American Don. Williams uses two loop pedals in his current band Battles
to create starkly different effects. Another example is Joe Driscoll, who layers both guitar riffs and oral percussion
. Some popular digital looping pedals are the Line 6 DL4 (used by Jazz guitarists Bill Frisell
, Matt Stevens and John Scofield
), the Boomerang Phrase Sampler (used by Trey Anastasio
of Phish
and Les Claypool
of Primus
), the Akai
E2 Headrush (used by Ian Williams
and KT Tunstall
), and the Boss Loop Station. David Gilmour
used a loop pedal to play the 10-minute introduction to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)
" during his solo concert (this concert was released on DVD as David Gilmour in Concert
) at the Royal Festival Hall
, London
in June 2001, as part of the Robert Wyatt
-curated Meltdown festival.
Record albums: Jean Jacques Perrey & Gershon Kingsley: The In Sound From Way Out (Vanguard Records, 1966, VSD 79222), Kaledoscopic Vibrations (Vanguard Records, 1967, VSD 79264), Moog Indigo (Vanguard Records, 1970, VSD 6549)
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, tape loops are loops
Music loop
In electroacoustic music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections of material can be repeated to create ostinato patterns...
of prerecorded magnetic tape
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...
used to create repetitive
Repetition (music)
Repetition is important in music, where sounds or sequences are often repeated. One often stated idea is that repetition should be in balance with the initial statements and variations in a piece. It may be called restatement, such as the restatement of a theme...
, rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
ic musical patterns or dense layers of sound
Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
. Contemporary composers such as Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
and Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
used tape loops to create phase
Phasing
In the compositional technique phasing, the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo...
patterns and rhythms. Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
originally employed the technique of tape looping in the 1950s; later producing such pieces as "Music For the Gift" (1963) and "Bird of Paradise" (1964) and culminating in his use of two tape recorder
Tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, tape deck, reel-to-reel tape deck, cassette deck or tape machine is an audio storage device that records and plays back sounds, including articulated voices, usually using magnetic tape, either wound on a reel or in a cassette, for storage...
s (collectively described by Riley as the "Time Lag Accumulator") in live solo performances to create long delays, during which he would play both saxophone and organ, as heard on the album Reed Streams (1966) and the piece "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" (on the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air
A Rainbow in Curved Air
A Rainbow in Curved Air is the third album by experimental music and classical minimalism pioneer Terry Riley. Through the use of overdubbing, the composer, a keyboard virtuoso, plays all the instruments on the title track: electric organ, electric harpsichord , dumbec , and tambourine...
). In 1973, musicians Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
and Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique...
used an entirely similar idea to make the album No Pussyfooting; Robert Fripp later coining the term "Frippertronics
Frippertronics
Frippertronics was a specific tape looping technique used by Robert Fripp. It evolved from a system of tape looping originally developed in the electronic music studios of the early 1960s that was first used by composers Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros and made popular through its use in ambient...
" to describe this process pioneered by Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
. In the mid-1980s, digital sampling
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
overtook much tape loop use. In the 1990s and 2000s, digital looping pedal
Effects unit
Effects units are electronic devices that alter how a musical instrument or other audio source sounds. Some effects subtly "color" a sound, while others transform it dramatically. Effects are used during live performances or in the studio, typically with electric guitar, keyboard and bass...
s became more affordable. One-man band
One-man band
A one-man band is a musician who plays a number of musical instruments simultaneously using their hands, feet, limbs, and various mechanical contraptions. The simplest type of "one-man band" — a singer accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and harmonica mounted in a metal "harp rack" below the...
s use looping pedals to record a groove or riff, and then they solo over the riff as it repeats.
Description
A measure of recorded magnetic tape is cut and spliced end-to-end, creating a circle or loop which can be played continuously, usually on a reel to reelReel to Reel
* For the audio technology, see "Reel-to-reel audio tape recording"Reel to Reel is the debut album by Grand Puba. It was Puba's first solo venture, following group projects with the likes of the short lived group Masters of Ceremony and Brand Nubian. Both of the group’s albums were critically...
machine. Tape loop effects are sometimes combined with a technique wherein the playback speed of the loop is increased or decreased over time, somewhat similar to a glissando
Glissando
In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento...
which slurs the pitch of a note up or down as used in music.
Simultaneous playing of tape loops to create phase patterns and rhythms was developed and initially used by musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
and tape music
Tape Music
Tape Music is an experimental 10" vinyl release by Jack Dangers. The vinyl release was coupled with the album Sounds Of The 20th Century No2 when released as a flexi disc vinyl....
composers, and was most extensively utilized by Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
for his "phasing
Phasing
In the compositional technique phasing, the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo...
" pieces such as "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain", and by Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
.
The length of the loop, of course, controlled the length of the repeated sound, combined with the desired content of the composer. On a standard reel-to-reel, one could loop, at most, a few seconds of music or sound. Some composers were satisfied with this approach, but there were other methods to allow for longer loops. For example, one could place two reel-to-reel machines side by side and string the tape between them, using one machine for playback and the other simply as a pulley for the length of tape. By using this or other methods, some composers could create very long loops which allowed for lengthier fragments of sound. When recording his landmark 1978 ambient
Ambient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
album Music for Airports
Music for Airports
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is an ambient album by Brian Eno released in 1978.-Overview:Music for Airports was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album's material and "the products of the various...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
reported that for a particular song, "One of the tape loops was seventy-nine feet long and the other eighty-three feet." (Prendergrast, 123)
Alternatively, one tape machine could be a playback machine while the second machine was a recording machine, creating not a tape loop, strictly speaking, but an extremely long echo.
History
Beginning in the late 1950s the BBC Radiophonic WorkshopBBC Radiophonic Workshop
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, one of the sound effects units of the BBC, was created in 1958 to produce effects and new music for radio, and was closed in March 1998, although much of its traditional work had already been outsourced by 1995. It was based in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in Delaware...
began using tape loops to add special effects to some BBC programming. Rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
musicians, most notably The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
, Daevid Allen
Daevid Allen
Daevid Allen , sometimes credited as Divided Alien, an Australian poet, guitarist, singer, composer and performance artist is co-founder of psychedelic rock groups Soft Machine and Gong .-Biography:In 1960, inspired by the Beat Generation writers he had discovered...
(who learned directly from Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, and has created entire pieces from tape loops throughout his career), Soft Machine
Soft Machine
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene, and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre...
(who learned from Daevid Allen), Fifty Foot Hose
Fifty Foot Hose
Fifty Foot Hose is a psychedelic rock band that formed in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and reformed in the 1990s. They were one of the first bands to fuse rock and experimental music...
, Can
Can (band)
Can was an experimental rock band formed in Cologne, West Germany in 1968. Later labeled as one of the first "krautrock" groups, they transcended mainstream influences and incorporated strong minimalist and world music elements into their often psychedelic music.Can constructed their music largely...
, and Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
, have used tape loops on their album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
s.
One of the more novel uses of tape loops were heavily utilized by French electronic pop composer Jean Jacques Perrey (sometimes working with American composer Gershon Kingsley) on a series of mid-60s albums on the Vanguard label. Their loops often had tight, multiple splices in them to create their frantic rhythmic loop effects, to which they added conventional instruments and synthesizers playing generally familiar instrumental up-tempo tunes. Their composition, "Baroque Hoedown", from their 1967 album, "Kaleidoscopic Vibrations" was adopted by Disney for their "Starlight Parade" event at Disneyland and Disneyworld, and was used by filmmaker Mike Jittlov
Mike Jittlov
Mike Jittlov is an American animator and the creator of short films and one feature length movie using forms of special effects animation, including stop-motion animation, rotoscoping, and pixilation...
for the "Mouse Mania" animated short film he made for Disney's Mickey Mouse 50th anniversary TV special in 1978.
In the early 1970s, musicians Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
and Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique...
utilized the techniques pioneered by Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
in the 60s. In 1974 a new musical instrument called a Birotron
Birotron
The Birotron is a tape replay keyboard conceived by Dave Biro of Yalesville, Connecticut, USA, and funded by Rick Wakeman of the progressive-rock group Yes, and Campbell Soup Company-Pepperidge Farm Foods in the mid-late 1970s....
was invented using tape loops from 8 track tapes. It offered the promise of the mainstream embracing tape loop music. A few years later, Mission of Burma
Mission of Burma
Mission of Burma is an American post-punk band formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1979. The band was formed by Roger Miller , Clint Conley , Peter Prescott and Martin Swope...
began using loops on their albums, and also began feeding snippets of vocals and guitar recorded moments earlier back into their live mix, thereby introducing live loop effects to punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
. Experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
noise music
Noise music
Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically...
ian NON aka Boyd Rice
Boyd Rice
Boyd Blake Rice is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard...
played loops of speeches, radio broadcasts and conversations just under the threshold of comprehensibility in his live shows, starting in 1977. Since then, he's created loops to evoke a hypnotic, trance state in his audiences.
Digital Loops
Digital samplingSampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
-- which can generally provide similar results with less effort—overtook much tape loop use, beginning in the mid 1980s. To create a loop digitally requires nothing more than highlighting a section of already-recorded music or sound and clicking on a 'repeat' or 'duplicate' icon as many times as you want the loop to repeat. Some musicians and composers, however, continue to use analog tape loops for various reasons.
Loop Pedals
A recent evolution of the tape loop is the looping pedal - a digital sampler built into an easy-to-use footswitch-operated pedal of the kind most often used by guitarists to create looping layers of melody or texture during a live performance.A noteworthy example of this melodic layering effect is Ian Williams
Ian Williams
Ian Williams is an American rock guitarist. He became noted for his finger tapping guitar playing in bands such as Don Caballero, Storm & Stress and currently in Battles.-Biography:...
' dense, complex layers of guitar on Don Caballero
Don Caballero
Don Caballero are an American rock group from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The group took their name from the character Guy Caballero, portrayed by Joe Flaherty, on the sketch comedy show Second City Television...
's American Don. Williams uses two loop pedals in his current band Battles
Battles (band)
Battles is an American experimental rock group, founded in 2002 in New York City, comprising guitarists Ian Williams and Dave Konopka , and drummer John Stanier .-Biography:...
to create starkly different effects. Another example is Joe Driscoll, who layers both guitar riffs and oral percussion
Beatboxing
Beatboxing is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of producing drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using one's mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It may also involve singing, vocal imitation of turntablism, and the simulation of horns, strings, and other musical instruments...
. Some popular digital looping pedals are the Line 6 DL4 (used by Jazz guitarists Bill Frisell
Bill Frisell
William Richard "Bill" Frisell is an American guitarist and composer.One of the leading guitarists in jazz since the late 1980s, Frisell's eclectic music touches on progressive folk, classical music, country music, noise and more...
, Matt Stevens and John Scofield
John Scofield
John Scofield , often referred to as "Sco," is an American jazz guitarist and composer, who has played and collaborated with Miles Davis, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson, Charles Mingus, Joey Defrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Pat Martino, Mavis Staples, Phil Lesh, Billy Cobham,...
), the Boomerang Phrase Sampler (used by Trey Anastasio
Trey Anastasio
Trey Anastasio is an American guitarist, composer, and vocalist most noted for his work with the rock band Phish...
of Phish
Phish
Phish is an American rock band noted for its musical improvisation, extended jams, and exploration of music across genres. Formed at the University of Vermont in 1983 , the band's four members – Trey Anastasio , Mike Gordon , Jon Fishman , and Page McConnell Phish is an American rock band...
and Les Claypool
Les Claypool
Leslie Edward "Les" Claypool is an American musician and writer, best known as the lead vocalist and bassist in the band Primus. Claypool's playing style on the electric bass mixes tapping, flamenco-like strumming, whammy bar bends and slapping.Claypool has also self produced and engineered his...
of Primus
Primus (band)
Primus is an American rock band based in San Francisco, California, currently composed of bassist/vocalist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry "Ler" LaLonde and drummer Jay Lane. Primus originally formed in 1984 with Claypool and guitarist Todd Huth, later joined by Lane, though the latter two departed...
), the Akai
Akai
Akai is a consumer electronics brand, founded by Saburo Akai as , a Japanese manufacturer in 1929. It is now headquartered in Singapore as a subsidiary of Grande Holdings, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, which also owns the formerly Japanese brands Nakamichi and Sansui. The Akai brand is now used...
E2 Headrush (used by Ian Williams
Ian Williams
Ian Williams is an American rock guitarist. He became noted for his finger tapping guitar playing in bands such as Don Caballero, Storm & Stress and currently in Battles.-Biography:...
and KT Tunstall
KT Tunstall
Kate Victoria "KT" Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist from St Andrews, Scotland. She broke into the public eye with a 2004 live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland...
), and the Boss Loop Station. David Gilmour
David Gilmour
David Jon Gilmour, CBE, D.M. is an English rock musician and multi-instrumentalist who is best known as the guitarist, one of the lead singers and main songwriters in the progressive rock band Pink Floyd. In addition to his work with Pink Floyd, Gilmour has worked as a producer for a variety of...
used a loop pedal to play the 10-minute introduction to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is a nine-part Pink Floyd composition written by Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour. The song is a tribute to former band member Syd Barrett, although it was not originally explicitly written with him in mind. It was first performed on their 1974 French...
" during his solo concert (this concert was released on DVD as David Gilmour in Concert
David Gilmour in Concert
David Gilmour in Concert is a DVD of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's solo concert at the Royal Festival Hall, London in June 2001, as part of the Robert Wyatt-curated Meltdown festival. It also features additional footage recorded during three concerts at the same venue in January 2002...
) at the Royal Festival Hall
Royal Festival Hall
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,900-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge. It is a Grade I listed building - the first post-war building to become so protected...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in June 2001, as part of the Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career...
-curated Meltdown festival.
Sources
- Mark Prendergrast; The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age; Bloomsbury, 2000; ISBN 1-58234-134-6
Record albums: Jean Jacques Perrey & Gershon Kingsley: The In Sound From Way Out (Vanguard Records, 1966, VSD 79222), Kaledoscopic Vibrations (Vanguard Records, 1967, VSD 79264), Moog Indigo (Vanguard Records, 1970, VSD 6549)
External links
- From Tape Loops To MIDI, from Stockhausen.org
- Making cassette tape loops