All Media, All Malleable - Page 3

Acid, and other loop producers, have released collections of loops by other well-known musicians: Rudy Sarzo, the bassist for Quiet Riot; Joey Kramer, the drummer for Aerosmith; keyboardist/arranger Giorgio Moroder, who's worked with Donna Summer and host of other dance artists; and ">Bill Lasswell, a synthesist and producer, who's worked with Mick Jagger, Miles Davis, and other superstar musicians.

And when Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the brilliant documentary about the Funk Brothers, that great Detroit record label's house band, was released to DVD last year, it included a second DVD-ROM that featured numerous Acid loops of the individual Funk Brothers in action.

Via the Acid recording program, as well as other programs that are compatible with Acidized loops, it's entirely possible for a home musician to combine the drumming of Mick Fleetwood, the keyboards of Bill Laswell and Giorgio Moroder, the bass of Motown's Bob Babbitt, the percussion of Joey Kramer, and then sing or play guitar on top of those great musicians. Acid and other creators of loop libraries are producing intentionally open-ended art: they bring musicians into the recording studio not to release a new CD for passive listening, but to release a CD-ROM full of data that will be sliced, diced, spliced, cut, pasted and reworked by consumers at home. And most loop collections are released with the legal understanding that the products created with these recordings are royalty free. In other words, if an Acid Loop from the Mick Fleetwood sessions is the foundation of your hit single, his lawyers won't be calling you for an additional cut.

Mash-Ups: "A Great Appropriation Idea"

Another popular pastime of home recordists is producing "mash-ups". Anybody's who's ever owned a cassette recorder has made mix tapes of his favorite songs to play in the car on a long drive.

Mash-ups, done on a computer, take the idea of the mix tape to its ultimate conclusion: instead of pasting one song after another, in a mash-up, a few bars of one song are combined with another, and possibly another, to produce a recording whose verses come from one tune, whose chorus comes from another, and whose middle eight comes from yet another. In some cases, a computer can isolate a song's vocal track, which can then be pasted on top of a new bed of instruments.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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