Loop mode: improvisation is composition is recording

Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s possible to splice different performances together with tape to make a seamlessly perfect one, but it’s a labor-intensive process. One way around the tradeoff is to have the best musicians in the world. The Beatles knocked out their early albums in a matter of hours. Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue took only two days of live recording. These kinds of heroic feats of musicianship are only possible if you’ve spent years playing together professionally, like the Beatles, or if you put in many hours of a day of disciplined practice, like the guys in Miles Davis’ band, or ideally, both.

Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.

The digital audio workstation offers a third way out. Compositing and splicing different performances together in Pro Tools isn’t any harder than copying and pasting paragraphs in a word processor. If you work in grid mode, you can effortlessly set a particular section to run on a loop, automatically recording each pass as a separate take. The performer can take as many tries as they want, with no need to stop and rewind in between each one. Because hard disk space is essentially free, there’s no cost barrier to running the loop endlessly, trying out different ideas until the right one pops out.

Loop recording was originally conceived as a way to help performers nail especially tricky passages. As with so much music technology, though, it’s taken on a broader creative function, in this case helping people write songs during the recording process. Hip-hop continues the jazz tradition of composing through improvisation. Where jazz musicians might write down a particularly tasty lick to turn it into a song on paper, hip-hop artists more often use the recording medium itself as the composition tool. With loop recording it becomes possible to give playfully tossed-off lines all the perfection and precision you could want. The standard hip-hop and R&B writing method is to put together a more or less complete instrumental track, and then improvise vocals on top. The best ideas get edited, looped, doubled, harmonized and layered into the finished product. As pop music gets more hip-hop oriented, more songwriting is taking the form of improvising in loop mode. The backing tracks themselves are also usually written in loop mode, though usually with sequencers rather than audio recording.

Ironically, having the freedom to effortlessly record and comp together unlimited takes can results in your not needing to. If you’re not under pressure to get things right in a certain number of takes first time, it can put you in the relaxed frame of mind that helps you get things right the first time. Cee-Lo Green’s arresting lead vocal in Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was famously recorded in one take.

Just for fun and visual inspiration, here are some of my Flickr images related to the concept of loop recording.

2 thoughts on “Loop mode: improvisation is composition is recording

  1. This is pretty amazing stuff. Worth a blog post of its own. “The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you’re in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that weren’t intended by the composer or the musicians.”

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