Modern Looping
Today many musicians use digital hardware and software devices to create and modify loops, often in conjunction with various electronic musical effects.
In the early 1990s dedicated digital devices were invented specifically for use in live looping i.e. loops that are recorded in front of a live audience. Notable live looping artists employing the new technology included Stars of the Lid and Radio Chongqing. Live looping is not exclusive to electronic music and is found in the singer/songwriter genre, achieving new popularity in the employ of popular artists such as Imogen Heap, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Marbin, and KT Tunstall.
Many hardware loopers exist in rack unit, effect pedal, or other forms. Early examples of rack and pedal loopers are the Gibson Echoplex, Looperlative LP1, DigiTech JamMan and the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Delay.
In 2004 there were 20 live looping festivals in 12 countries in this burgeoning international movement. These include Loopstock established in 2002 in San Luis Obispo, California, and the Y2K? series, established in 2000 in Santa Cruz, California. The Y2K4 International Live Looping Festival in October 2004 in San Francisco and Santa Cruz drew 50 loopers from 5 different countries over four days.
The musical loop is one of the most important features of video game music. It is also the guiding principle behind devices like the several Chinese Buddhist music boxes that loop chanting of mantras, which in turn was the inspiration of the Buddha machine, an ambient-music generating device. The Jan Linton album "Buddha Machine Music" used these loops along with others created by manually scrolling through CDs on a CDJ player.
A major advantage of looping that it can be used continually, and not have the quality degradation that is inherent when musician playing a musical part repeatedly (human error). Additionally there can be huge cost savings, on the production end.
Read more about this topic: Loop (music)
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or looping:
“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)