Viewing: Music Gear - View all posts

Using a Looper 

c

I bought my looper maybe 15 years ago. It is a Boss LoopStation RC-20XL Phrase Recorder. Here's what it looks like:

 

 

I 1st used it actively in Steve & Chris, 2017-2019. with me & most excellent harpist Steve Konopka (Fuzzy). I don't think you can buy them anymore.

 I also used a Digitech LiveStation 3 harmony box. I haven't used that in years. It works great with Eagles, not at all w Louis Armstrong.

What Boss is offering now has buttons rather than pedals. I far prefer pedals, much easier to hit when you are playing standing up, in an unfamiliar configuration.

To start recording a loop, or to start playing it back, you press the left pedal. To stop the loop(s), you hit the right pedal. To erase the loop(s), you press & hold the right pedal. 

Playing with a looper, over the years I learned 3 main principles. I added a less important 4th.

  1. Per excellent looper user Jairaj Schwann: always start the looper on the 1. 
    Jairaj was a serious musician, degree from UMass Amherst, ab fab bass player. I had mostly found people using loopers to get pretty stale quickly. At a “guitarists” show, Jairaj was playing a 6 string bass. He would lay down a bass track on the looper on the bottom strings. Then add a rhythm track on the middle strings. Then play lead on the top strings. Incredible! & when he got tired of it, he'd wipe the whole thing & start over.
    Jairaj told me, “Always start the looper on the 1". I thought I knew better, I tried starting the looper on the 4 a few times. It never worked out. Always start the looper on the 1.
     
  2. Given that the looper & the looper playback start on the 1, realize that sometimes you start a solo before you kick the looper in with the rhythm track. You may play 2-5 notes of the solo before you kick the background loop on. See example below.
     
  3. This is a more minor point. Realize that, based on what you want to play a solo over, sometimes you will skip a verse or 2 before you kick the looper on to start recording. See example below.
     
  4. When I 1st started the looper, I tried to use it as I would pedals on an electric guitar: I would start the looper replay, & then use the (awkward) volume knobs on my guitar to turn the volume of the solo up.
    At some point I realized, no! The looper has a knob (upper left of pic) that contols the output level of the recorded loop. I back it down from 12pm to 11pm. So the replayed loop is softer, the solo is at the original louder level. No playing with a volume knob, or overdrive pedal!

    I mentioned this to the sound man at an Open Mic I have been playing in Naples. I suggested him hitting the “Solo” button on the guitar channel, to put the rhythm guitar back to the volume it had been at & make the solo louder. He said he thought that the way it sounded now was perfect for the room we were in. He thought what I was doing was the proper thing to do, & wished others used the same technique - although I'm the only one using a looper there?!?!?

Normally I record a rhythm guitar part,  then play lead guitar over it - so only 1 loop. You tap the left pedal to start recording, tap 2 2nd time to replay the loop. You tap the right pedal to stop the loop.

I decided to try a Rickie Lee Jones song, “young blood” (1979), with 3 loops; a bass line, emphasis chords on the 1 & the 3, & a syncopated riff. I don't know if all loopers work this way, but on the Boss, you have to record the 1st loop, then play it back; record the 2nd loop, then play it back; record the 3rd loop, then play it back &  play a solo line over the top of all 3 of them. So you hit the left pedal a total of 6 times to get the 3 loops in place. 

Note. this is my older musical alter ego, Jim Dumas. Jim plays music >~= Elvis. Jaz is <~= Elvis.  Note also, I use the harmony box at the end, on “Something happenin' there”.

Here's the song:

Here's a song demonstrating points 2 & 3 above: the Hoagy Carmichael classic “stardust”. I think this is pretty much Willie Nelson's version. You start the recording late. You start & stop the loop to solo over it 2x.

I (or rather Jim Dumas) have been thinking I'll go back & try some modern (> Elvis) songs with the looper. Some Hendrix maybe?

A Tale of Two Guitars 

When I started playing in Steve & Chris with blues harpist Steve Konopka (Fuzzy) in 2017, I was playing a solid body electric guitar: a Fender Stratocaster or a DBZ Imperial.

I grew up playing classical and electric guitars. I have never met a steel stringed 14 fret acoustic that I enjoyed playing.

1 Sunday at Cora Lee's open mic at Cosmic Charlie's at its cursed National Ave location, there was an old guy - Charlie Wethington, I think - playing an electric classical (nylon stringed) guitar.

I gotta get me 1 of those!

So Steve went with me to Wilcutt Guitars. They had 2 Fenders and 2 of another brand. The Fender CN-240 SCE Thinline sounded 2x as good as the others, so I bought 1. I found a nice matching strap at Willis Music, which used to have the largest local collection of straps.

Dark blond, with a woven floral rosette in gold and black. I played this in Steve and Chris from then on.

Jaz Dumoz was born around the start of the pandemic, spring 2020. When I was getting ready for my 1st Jaz gig, summer 2021, I realized I needed another of these guitars. I always like n+1 redundancy when I'm playing. Additionally, the nylon strings take weeks to get broken in. If I was gigging regularly and needed to change strings, I needed a 2nd guitar with its strings already broken in - 2 guitars kept in rotation.

I was back in Lexington and just figured I'd go to Wilcutts' and buy another 1. No luck, Fender quit making them.

So I turned to my friend, incredible guitarist Lindsay Olive, to find me one on eBay. He is very eBay-savvy.

He found one still in the factory box, about the same price I had paid before. So he got it for me.

I was expecting it to be identical to the other one. It was not: natural vs dark blond finish, and a very elegant, simple rosette, a ring of mother-of-pearl looking stuff. I found a great strap for it at etsy.com.

I was thinking, I would make this the primary Jaz Dumoz guitar. The older 1 I had played with Steve. Plus the beautiful blue strap matched my eyes ;->

Here's where the plot thickens. I'm practicing on the new guitar, the James Smith solo to "honeysuckle rose", trying to play an F and an F6 at the 13th fret. My hand is getting jammed in the cutaway?!?!?

I try it on the old guitar - no problem?!?!? I start measuring the guitars. The bodies are of a size, but look at the cutaways:

On the old (top) guitar, the farthest spot on the cutaway is between the 17th & 18th frets. 

On the new (under) guitar, the farthest spot on the cutaway is between the 15th & 16th frets!

So 2 frets difference in accessibility up the neck, ~1.5" Here's me playing the F6 on the old guitar. There is not 1.5" separation between the side of my hand and the cutaway.

It turns out the new guitar is a CN-140 SCE Thinline, not a CN-240 like the older guitar.

My 1st thought was that this was no good, I wanted the guitars to be equally capable. So I'd thought that I'd get another CN-240 and then sell the CN-140. There are more CN-240s on eBay, and you can see from the pictures that they have the same rosette and cutaway as mine.

But, I like the variety of the 2 guitars I have now. And so far, only 1 song out of ~150 where the smaller cutaway caused a problem - and not a fatal problem, you can grab the F chords, it's just a little harder. Other than that, they play pretty much identically.

So for now, I'll stick with these 2. That can of course be changed down the road.