very thoughtful TGP post by David Torn about looper pedals

[rfurtkamp]

I want external ins for whatever pedals I want to trigger with - I have 1/4" switches I like for various applications. Some hard, some soft, some latching, some not.

[D.o.S.]

Also, who is David Torn?

[Uncle Grandfather]

Also, who is David Torn?

i thought it was just some random person at tgp but he made the point of tooting his own horn so he must be a somebody.

[guitarslinger21]

I love simple loopers. The Boss RC-1 was a step in the right direction for Boss.

[Dark Barn]

In 2013, Kaivax, a community manager for Blizzard Entertainment, announced that Torn worked on the StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm soundtrack, "adding burning leads and strange textures to the Zerg palette on several tracks."

I didn't know who he was until today, but he has a Wikipedia page and quite a few famous cousins.

Edit: and looks he did a record with Mick Karn and Terry Bozzio that I'm suddenly stoked to listen to.

[D.o.S.]

Nifty. Bozzio is one of the very best drummers I've ever seen in person.

[jrmy]

Yeah, I've heard of Torn off and on for years, but never sat down and listened to his stuff. Always pegged him as a kind of outside-y fusion guy, somewhere between Belew, Fripp and Vernon Reid. I used to work booking at my college many years back, and I feel like he might have also done some Windham Hill "sensitive atmospheric acoustic" stuff too, but I can't be 100% on that one.

Ye gads, the shit that accumulates in the corners of my brain.

[Jwar]

You I'll admit. I have (clearly) no idea what the hell he's even talking about. Reading that broke my brain a little.

[John]

If the simple loopers had midi or usb out to synch tempos and send/receive control signals, then you could have one or a million Dittos or whatever, each one with its own settings, and they'd work together AND be modular.

[rfurtkamp]

The newer Digitech Ditto competitor thing has some sort of sync port/feature to let them talk to each other.

[John]

Oh reallllllly! SCHWING

[rustywire]

He does raise some good points about loopers...buried within the wordiness...but I don't really care about all the options and features he wants.
I don't need every single effect to have it's own modulation. Different strokes, I guess...
But he couldn't be more wrong about the following text, bolded for emphasis:

no, wait..... don't get me wrong!
i get it.
to me, they're fun & cool & occasionally useful; but, creatively-speaking?
in most cases, there's a pretty quick creative dead-end built-into them gadgets;
they are, somehow, (almost-, kinda-) playback devices.
::::::::::

it is disturbing that folks' visions of looping have narrowed & moved so far backwards, and over such a short period of time.

obligatory


Quite a few of his posts over the years have left me thinking "this guy seems to know what he's talking about" on numerous occasions.
I had never before checked his music or looked him up...but did after attempting to decipher that looper rant. The TED talks link in his sig.
I had to use YT's seek bar frequently, both during his musical performance and the rambling monologue.
I don't want to trash the guy but all I could think was "some good tone here and there....but boring, boring, boring." "Who cares?" "I cant wait for this to end"
I'm clearly not the audience he's playing to...

What I find disturbing is how some over-the-hill, out-of-touch, crotchety-old-codgers can turn around and complain about the vision of others after insisting it's the looper that has a "pretty quick creative dead-end" and not the myopic user. I just cant get on board with that kind of fool's logic.
"Creative dead-ends" are almost always the result of user limitation, not the equipment. Unsurprisingly, his written words convey more passion than his live playing or mic presence. At least based on that one clip in his sig...

Anyway, maybe he means well, IDK. It comes off as extremely bitter and sanctimonious. The TGP way


As far as loopers go-
I want ZVEX to do a "Super Loop Junky" in a single enclosure, with a series/parallel footswitch & duration-matching autoloop functionality.
And a Digitech RI PDS-8000. And an updated version with expanded time and bit depth/sampling rate options, removable HDSC etc

[tremolo3]

Also, who is David Torn?

i thought it was just some random person at tgp but he made the point of tooting his own horn so he must be a somebody.

He have some good points but after reading the first 3 pages and the so-called-in-developmen-looper#1 I can't stop thinking that all that rant and pointing the "shitty" the current loopers are just to sell the idea that people will need to buy it once released.

[ChetMagongalo]

There's a good reason why the hardware looper of OP's dreams doesn't exist. Software can do it for much cheaper and easier. Honestly I don't think guitarists really need feature laden loopers to move forward and innovate their music. Guitar does a very good job at doing mostly simple things, if you want to do cool shit with looping and sampling, I don't really see why you'd want to do it with a guitar. That's the reason I sold my CT5, because I don't have any equipment I think would be ideal for it (vocal stuff, table top electronics, synths, DAWs etc). Obviously you can do cool shit with a CT5 and a guitar, but it wasn't what worked well with my personality for gear. I think MOST guitarists including myself are satisfied with the options available today. If you're not, you're in the minority, and you're probably gonna have to DIY or shell out a lot of money.

[ApeLincoln]

I think MOST guitarists including myself are satisfied with the options available today. If you're not, you're in the minority, and you're probably gonna have to DIY or shell out a lot of money.

I think that's sort of his point though isn't it? That most guitarists are content, although he seems to think that we are satisfied because we can only imagine what the big companies are willing to show us. Which I find pretty condescending and wrong, I think it has more to do with the fact that we want to play our guitar as an instrument and not play our looper as an instrument.

I'm plenty happy with my ditto and 2880 and I don't feel like it's keeping me from making any of the music I want to make?