Chord Looper Video

I've been playing around with the chord looper, but for me, it's not very intrusive, and I kinda gave up on it. But after watching this chord looper video, I once again have an interest, and will be back giving it another go. This is a long, previously live video on the chord looper. (I suggest moving ahead to around the 7 minute mark)

Thanks Larry. I absolutely love the chord looper , and learned how to use it from the last video that you posted, and I very much look forward to studying this latest video.

Hey Paul, happy for you, now that you now have the SX-900.

I've used the chord looper, and I'm getting better at it, but the thing I have a problem with, is the timing. It seems like I'm always either a little behind, or ahead of playing along with the chord looper. Other than that it's a great tool, and opens up using both hands to play along.

Have fun

Yeah, it can be a little tricky…. You need to push the looper a mesure before the loop is to start and a measure before it ends. You can push the loop button anywhere with the measure.

For an exercise start with 2 bar chord sequences such ii V ( songs like Oye Como Va) then try doing 4 bar sequences , 8 bar sequences , 12 bar blues, and so forth.

I do my loops on the fly, But the great thing is you can save your chord loops too!

I used to find the looper a great tool for quickly auditioning styles with the head changes of the song. That way you concentrate on truly listening to the style and the way the fills flow rather that using any concentration on playing the changes.

But for me, the deal maker is the freedom to FULLY utilize the bender. You simply are hobbling your expression only being able to use the bender when you aren’t playing a chord change, and so many real instruments are bending ACROSS the chord boundaries, not while the chord is static.

Want great sax solos, guitar solos, fiddle solos etc., etc.?

Got to use the bender a LOT, 🎹😎

An arranger without a looper is crippled…

Really? A WHOLE bar in advance? Roland’s looper record mode can be started up to about the beginning of the fourth beat of the preceding bar, just like fills can be. And the start and stop of the loop the same leeway. I don’t understand… what could possibly be the need to set this up a whole bar ahead?

It might be worth slowing the tempo way down and experimenting with just how close to the bar boundary you can get the looper to engage…

Many always hear the end product and never fully understand what happens behind the scenes to create such beautiful music. One simple trick (as already suggested above) to get close to perfection is ... record at slower speeds to make sure all notes fall in the right place - then speed it up :-)

I do not think that records (which are supposed to be "perfect", in contrast to live concerts) are recorded in slow-motion and played back faster.

Actually records are recorded in many takes, with each player/singer alone (listening for feedback to a tentative mix of the recordings of the others components of the band).
Often a single riff is a collage of many different takes, which are only "perfect" for a few measures (and NOT for the whole verse/chorus/song, no matter how hard you try again and again).

The complete final record is assembled in the mixer (= DAW nowadays), where many effects are added as well. What you hear NEVER happened altogether at the same time in the same place. It is only an illusion that is necessary to have the perfection humans cannot produce on their own.

If the music is electronic, then it is likely that NOBODY ever played a single note. It has been simply sequenced in the DAW (with a mouse, or possibly edited after playing a few notes on the keyboard, even by very bad players that could never play live in an acceptable way).

Playing in slow motion rarely will produce the right feeling that makes a piece of music sound good and authentic.

Sorry groovy, but that’s not really true any more. Pitch and tempo transposition has leaped forward by huge amounts in the last decade. Tempo adjustment can be (within limits) adjusted completely undetectably, not only can pitch for single notes be corrected, but notes WITHIN chords and complex recordings can be corrected and adjusted. And electronic music often has as much that was originally played on a keyboard and then possibly edited and quantified as it has made by inputting with a mouse.

There just aren’t any rules any more. Guitar loops with the wrong chord and wrong tempo for a project can be undetectably changed to fit a new project, tracks laid down by real players can be quantized to rhythmic perfection (or imperfection!), you can input synth parts to a DAW merely by humming them into a mic!

And yes, god’s walk among us, there are players who achieve perfection (or whatever the producer is looking for) in one uncut take. You find a lot of these over on the jazz side, but at the top end, studio musicians can still do great work in one take..!

What HAS changed is the option if a studio god is outside the budget of a small production to, as you say, ‘comp’ together whatever will pass for ‘perfection’ (truth is, there’s no such thing!). And nowadays, yes there’s even the option to slow the DAW down a bit while audio is recorded and then, just like sequencing, speed it back up to nominal. And, in truth, this has been done even on hit records for decades with multitrack tape decks. There’s nothing REALLY new under the sun!

But, to finish, I think you actually missed the point of AJ’s post… the thread is about using chord loopers with an arranger. Modern chord loopers allow you to store and link the loops with Registrations, but most arrangers at this time don’t have the tools to edit the loop as easily as you can a sequence. So his post was about recording the loop by hand at a slower tempo, so the player can take the care to be as precise as possible before it is used at full tempo, because it can’t really be edited afterwards without a ton of bother.

Ditto!

The sad part is ... actual musicians and creators are not having as much 'value' today as they did yesterday due to 'technology' which has 'eased' music creation and put most of it in the hands of studio engineers and 'techies' who are getting more 'relevance' in today's music world .... again I say, unfortunately ... in my opinion!

Well, the first domino to fall was Napster, and the concept that ‘sharing’ the music you bought with 100M ‘friends’ rather than laboriously cobbling mix tapes together one at a time to hand out to just the ONE friend, was legitimate rather than plain theft.

Pop music was always a very expensive art form at the level that pre-Napster musicians and labels practiced it at. Remove a good 80%+ of the profit margin, obviously major cuts had to be made in the production costs, and that was the margin that the great studio players, engineers and studio owners lived on.

The 60’s through the 80’s represent a zenith that it seems unlikely will ever be reached again until attitudes about that music should be free change radically. And in today’s post-industrial service economy that doesn’t honestly seem likely… 🎹🤔😢

Thank you Diki for clarifying. I meant somewhere within the mesure - usdusly one or two beats before , but it be less too.

No problem. Yes, just like fills, I feel no later than just before beat 4 (if 4/4) is generally the latest you can guarantee everything’s going to work.

Don’t forget, you HAVE to get back to actually playing the chords before the looper starts recording. If a chord is playing from before you hit record, the looper doesn’t ’catch’ it, because you didn’t play it while in record. So if the end of the loop isn’t the same chord, when the loop repeats it will continue to play the chord at the end until it gets to the chord you first actually played!

So, although you possibly COULD go later than on beat 4 to hit Record, you run the risk of not getting back to playing before the ‘one’…

Obviously, not such a big deal if you are recording loops to use later, and are slowing down the tempo, but if you’re using it live at full tempo, it’s a good habit to get into being consistent as to what beat you go hit Record on. One less thing to worry about!

If you are a pianist/singer, you can usually lay down a really good loop while you accompany your vocal for the verse and chorus, or head if jazz. You’ll tend to play the correct inversions etc, and just be fairly basic. Then you can hit Play, have the chords played for you and start to stretch a bit, reharmonize a bit, etc..

But a pretty cool trick is to turn BassInversion off while you record the loop (if it’s a song that doesn’t really use inversions much) and actually PLAY other inversions by changing up your LH. The accompaniment will still sound ‘normal’, but then, on one of the repeats of the loop, turn on the BassInv feature, and the whole flavor of the song will change without you having to go back to playing the chords. And with BassInv tasked to a footswitch, you can even do it just in certain spots, differently each repeat.

Another cool looper trick is to lay the loop down only with open 5th (no 3rd) chords, then you can substitute all kinds of different voicings without clashing with the accompaniment. It’s especially effective with modern light rock styles (lots of open 9th chords in today’s rock) and gives you tons of room to reharmonize and play alternate changes…

If you’ve never really played with a band and would like a taste of what it entails, record the loop for a song or a verse/chorus structure, then turn off all the arranger parts other than bass drums and rhythm guitar. Now try to fill in your comp and all the horn or string or synth parts live. That’s what you have to do in a live band! Practice this enough, next time you get to sit in with a band, you are better prepared to do more than just play the piano or organ part…

Get creative with your looper!