What is Livelooping?
Livelooping is enormously fun – You can do it too!
Livelooping is about creating, juggling with and reworking loops to create complex music on-the-fly, normally without using prerecorded material. This is not the same as the static loops typically heard in the background of some contemporary music. Livelooping is more like standing by the edge of a huge canyon and sing back to your own echo. Then you take it one step further by catching the echoes and rework them to create a building of music. While doing that you stay on top of the roof and keep on playing to create new material for the next floor. The building grows, changes, falls apart and grows back into different directions…
In order to start livelooping
you need at least one loop based real-time sampler, or software loopers in a computer. By controlling recording, looping and editing with your feet you will keep your hands free to play instruments that provide the raw sound material for looping.
A new way of listening
For an audience a livelooping concert can be an incredibly inspiring experience. You are not presented a finished artwork that is locked into its composed form. Instead, you are able to follow in detail how each musician is adding his parts to the music – note after note, loop after loop. It is like an instantly evolving ritual of magic that never repeats itself.
I think livelooping can bridge the gap between composer, director, DJ, musician and remix artist. It is a true crossover technique and a meta instrument that can ultimately free your creativity!
Livelooping.org
Loopers Delight
Comparison chart of looping tools
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Comments
I just came across this other site http://www.livelooping.org that seems quite interesting as well. Check it out!
Why not call improvisation a means of composition, or vice versa? In other words it oftenly seems to make sense to compose in a live context and record the improcomposition, if to turn it into an almost classical repetition of what it was at first at a later stage. Why not repeat it, when it was good?
Thank you very much for the looper comparison chart (note that repeater has 999 loops, not 99…)
Greta site, much respect, jayrope / Berlin
@jayrope,
Interesting points! Yes, I’ve heard that Mozart was a great improviser as well as a composer, so maybe he was using your method 
Myself, I’m not only in love with the resulting sound of the music but also with the thrill, the excitement, the process and the power in the “wide open present” when you stick to improvisation. Regarding 999 loops of the Repeater, I’ll correct the typo. Thanks for telling! Regarding composition vs improvisation one reason to keep them apart might be when the composer writes into his score instructions for he players to improvise along along certain given rules. I was talking to Elliott Sharp at Stockholm New Music and he showed me his score where each one of the four bass clarinet players at a certain part of the composition has to chose one out of many optional parts and loop that note sequence in their playing. What Sharp has done in that score is in fact to build an RMX Chaos random function into a live ensemble!
Why not call improvisation a means of composition, or vice versa? In other words it oftenly seems to make sense to compose in a live context and record the improcomposition, if to turn it into an almost classical repetition of what it was at first at a later stage. Why not repeat it, when it was good?Thank you very much for the looper comparison chart (note that repeater has 999 loops, not 99…)
+1
Internet Music Hub
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