Get Loopy With These Digital Mixing Tricks
There is pretty bad joke that begins with "Knock, knock. Who's there?" and is followed by "Philip Glass. Philip Glass who?" Instead of the typical and expected knock-knock conclusion, however, the joke works only if the initial interlocutor then repeats her initial question, thus dooming the responder to an endless, enclosed, and dorky loop that honors the famed minimalist composer, renowned for his work with repetition. With growing frustration and waning enthusiasm, the iteration changes, evolving beyond the simple-mindedness of its own content, and becoming a sort of commentary on the incessant existence of knock-knock jokes in general.
Of course, Glass is quite recent in the long history of musical looping. Meditative, pulsating, and oftentimes trance-inducing rhythms are about as old as breathing itself. Though not necessarily novel, 20th-century composers embarked on a never-ending cycle to break the chains of the 12-tone plateau. In doing so, composers including Glass, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and many others elevated the possibilities of looping towards an impossible limit. Robert Fripp invented his analog Flippertronics, a guitar and tape delay setup, in 1979, though the accessibility of digital machines has since marked looping as somewhat of a musical norm. Stuck in an antiquated Ouroboros? This how-to just might help you jump the track.
(Photo by Jeff Vogt/flickr/CC)
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