Impossible Acoustic

    In the late 1940s, the first boxed cake mixes were marketed to housewives across the country.  The initial sales were unexpectedly low, so food companies surveyed women to find out why the product was so unpopular.  What they found was that most women felt  the “just add water” convenience of the cake mixe was too easy.  It felt like cheating, like the cook wasn’t contributing anything.  To solve this, the company simply removed a few ingredients from the mix and added instructions   to add eggs, milk, or butter.  This was enough so that women felt like they were actually cooking. After that cake mixes went on to become a household staple.   

    I can relate to this story.  Just like the housewives of the 40s and 50s, I find that the convenience of using loops to make music doesn’t leave me feeling like I can really call the finished product my own.   I want to feel that I’ve put something of myself into the music I make and I don’t feel that way after stringing loops together.  Recently though, I’ve discovered a compromise which I call “playable loops”.  These are loops that can be played on the keyboard.  Once recorded, I have no control over the loops themselves, but by playing them at different pitches, rhythmicaly re-triggering them, and layering them in different ways, I feel like I’m actually performing and not just doing a “paint-by-number”.  

  In keeping with the cooking theme, the first beat is played on a metal mixing bowl.  To make things more interesting, I put my head right up next to the bowl and made vowel shapes with my mouth.  Listen and you can hear the filtering effect this has.  

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  Creating a beat like this from a multi-sampled instrument would be difficult.  Getting the sound of the bowl  with both finger and fingernail strikes would require multiple sets of articulations.  Replicating the mouth filter effect in a natural sounding way would be near impossible.  Loops are a bit paradoxical, while they are static in the sense that they’re the same every time, the contents of the loop can be much more dynamic than a multi-sampled instrument.  

  In order to play the loop at different pitches, I simply mapped the loop across the keyboard.   In order to align the loop with the track tempo, I used Kontakt’s “Beat Machine” mode.  I’ve also added a release sample so that now, when the loop is played across multiple pitches at a faster tempo it sounds like this.  

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  I have also made two more instruments out of two more loops.  The second loop is of autoharp overtones being played with chopsticks…..

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…and the third is a prepared guitar, also played with chopsticks.  I’m alternating between striking the open string and muting the string with my free hand. 

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 Playing all of these loops together as a multi is incredibly fun.  It’s like having an entire band at your fingertips.  Sure, the rhythms are always the same, but what would otherwise take hours of tracking and programing can now be played live.  Nice and convenient, just like a cake mix.  The following song is a live recording of me playing the multi on my keyboard without any overdubs.

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