So, guys with guitars and echo pedal/looping stations doing the one-man-band thing, you into it or not?

I like it when you have one and you're in a band. But I typically always prefer bands to solo artists anyway.

Thomas Truax is kind of a god at this.

i gotta say, i fucking despise this

there are dozens of people doing this in melbourne, and i just can't stand it.

What do you dislike about it?

at its worst it often ends up in performers making tediously repetitive "experimental soundscapes" that build up loop after loop into some cacophony that isn't terribly interesting and doesn't sound very good either

at its best it really seems to restrict the people doing it - it seems like the songs are forced into a certain structure or just end up meandering

none of this is *necessarily* intrinsic to the equipment but i'm yet to see anyone do much beyond this.

Ach, you might be right. I guess I like the cacophony more than the song most times. I can see how it could be very gimmicky for somebody who's essentially a straight singer-songwriter dealie.

in many ways, to me anyway, it seems to encourage very lazy songwriting. fair enough if that's not the goal.. i'd love to see someone take it further, or see it done really well - it's not like loops haven't been extensively used to make great music before...

Bit old hat surely?

I am an easily-impressed simpleton at the best of times.

Suppose depends how you do it. Makes me think of the 70s - John Martyn, Fripp, Ash Ra Tempel, Achim Reichel etc.

need to do this with metal and no loopstation. loopstations are for pussies, unless you're keith rowe.

prepare it before you loop it

I saw this guy called Fear Falls Burning as a support act for Cult Of Luna once, doing this kinda thing. I was never so bored with a supporting act.

Makes me think of the 70s - John Martyn, Fripp, Ash Ra Tempel, Achim Reichel etc.

this is why i voted for the second option. but i totally forgot about k.t. tunstall.

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got somethin to say

But nothin comes out when they move their lips

Just a bunch of gibberish

Motherfuckers act like they forgot about K.

(T. Tunstall)

KEITH ROWE FUCKERS.

the best live show i have EVER seen. prepared guitar, loopstation, radio.

I voted for the second option. If looping is used with a band, and used to build up textures in the background, then it's OK.

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/content/images/2006_2174.JPG

I seem to be agreeing with everything strgn is saying today

yellow6 does this, he's very good at it, i recommend seeing him if you get a chance

Yeah, echoing. Friendly guy too.

Ha ha, I've been doing this lately on and off as I can't be arsed to deal with musicians egos any more (including my own to be honest). But I'm trying to find creative uses for it rather than just building up drones into a big blurry ambient mess. It's like anything - good musicians find good uses for what they're working with. I saw Johnny Dowd playing a solo show with loops and films along with guitar + voice, and it was great. I've also seen a bunch of no-marks heading down the tedium highway more times than I care to remember, so a bit of musicality never does any harm. I suppose anyone can make loops sound nominally "good" can't they?

I'm mostly listening to solo Black Metal acts at the moment. State of the technology seems to be such that you can put amazing sounds together without having to wait for anyone else to come along. So go for it, dude!

this can be really really good, or really really bad -- depending.

classic: Spectrum, of course. and Eluvium's doing it well these days in his live shows.

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dud: Howie Day.

Is this what Joe Satriani and Steve Vai are doing?

building up drones into a big blurry ambient mess

Oh hell I love that stuff. And it can be fascinating to see/hear how the track is built up. Then again, it tends to be more late-night blissout listening for me than something I see live, and when I have seen it live it's been split about 50/50 for me into "really lovely" and "I like the resulting sounds OK but still pretty dull" (no "really terrible" yet though I can see that might happen). So I'm torn between "this shit is what I look for" and "I guess, if...", cz I have a higher tolerance than most people, but still not unlimited.

I think a duo might be a good compromise; in a full band this kind of trickery risks getting lost, and solo I guess you have to make a compromise (or not even try - obviously a few people are good enough to break out of this dichotomy, but anyway) between the solid anchor of unchanging rhythms and chords and between freeform noodling, whereas with a duo one of you can pin it down but still let the rhythm section evolve while the other freaks out, or you can both go for one or the other and head in even more unexpected directions, and if it does start on that tedium highway at least the audience gets to watch how you interact and signal changes to each other rather than just some hunched guy with hair cascading towards his pedals for half an hour.

(That was a spur-of-the-moment ramble and may not be borne out by actual live evidence. though I guess part of the attraction of the solo loop show thing is how intimate it feels anyway)

And it can be fascinating to see/hear how the track is built up.

oh boy. you've gotta see Eluvium, if you have not.

If done correctly, of course. On the other hand there's Lichens...

Lichens is great!

if this was on the noise board you would all be banned

i like lichens

Saw Joseph Arthur do this one evening. Made a hell of a racket. Then he painted a picture while he sang.

er ive been working on this kind of thing but with mostly drums-- more or less boring you think?

It's feast or famine with this "style" ... you either get mindblowing stuff or aimless noodling, no in between.

Visually speaking, I love watching a minimally animated person crank out tremendous amounts of noise on stage.

I like watching super animated people crank out a minimal amount of sound on stage.

Doing spectacularly well with said style -- Adam Forkner

http://omlet.co.uk/images/onemanband.gif

lotta this stuff in pdx (see forkner, eluvium namedrops) but also dont miss gulls. and ifsh ---> myspace.com/ifsh he uses nothing but found objects, old radios, toys etc. sounds gimmicky and its kinda precious in a portland sorta way but well done i think!

why is it laptop one man bands get a pass but guitar guys do not?

it's a given that laptop guys aren't going to have friends to make music with, i guess

because guitars suck man, didn't you see that poll????

I'm not JBR, so don't blame her for this! She has a guest on her account, cuz i can't register a new one cuz of general board clusterfukkeree.

So: please excuse the self-promo, but it's gettin hard out here for a pimp...

I'm a one-man-band guitar+looper guy, and I can't stand most of that stuff either. Ergo, I don't do that stuff:

http://www.altruistmusic.com/soundfiles/part2.mp3

http://www.altruistmusic.com/soundfiles/part3.mp3

Your general critique, derision, and Eno-esque philosophical abstractions are certainly encouraged and expected.

the only one man band i need:

http://www.myspace.com/antibassmetal

one of my friends said that jon brion does it pretty well.

What, so guys do this live looping thing as well?! I've only seen girls do this (Imogen Heap/Juana Molina/Feist) - extremely well in all three cases, but maybe I'm easily impressed.

I saw Skerik do this with a looper and his sax at a Coalition of the Willing show. It was really cool.

i enjoy local band the dodos that do this with a rockin drummer.

more fun with a keyboard

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

An amazing number of these dudes on YouTube. YT user tubescreamer has got a bunch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvBuTYCZ1IY

I wish him luck in whatever internet scheme helps him finance those Matchless amps.

That's a lot of expensive gear right there. Is he filming in a guitar store?

Anyway, like a lot of things, there's kind of a low barrier of entry to this kind of music in terms of being able to make something that sounds passably cool, so there's a lot of boring but passably cool sounding stuff out there. Doesn't mean it can't be done extraordinarily well - Dustin Wong's live set completely blew me away. It was intense and dynamic and not droney or plodding at all.