To copy directly from my work-notes:

For this project, I decided to once again challenge myself in a way I previously had not. I decided that not only would I perform music in the ACTLab for the first time (seriously - the closest thing previous was probably the demonstration of my third EFH project), but I would perform with a loop pedal for the first time as well. I had a small piece of a song that had been kicking around my head for a while, and so a few weeks ago, I recorded something of a sketch, played around with other parts to layer, and turned the piece into a more developed part of a whole. I still didn't like the whole all that much. So I began deconstructing the entire effort. I decided that I wanted to perform with a loop pedal, and play everything live.

After starting work on the musical content, I started wrestling with the idea of how to get all of the instruments and such I needed hooked up to the loop pedal at once. I went so far as to design a box with an elaborate series of switches that would just toggle whichever inputs were selected. After I had decided that I had a good start with my concepts, I went to go work on the music with the loop pedal, and realized shortly thereafter that I could just hook up the output of a mixer to the pedal, and just connect everything to that. Here I was trying to re-invent the wheel when there was already a simple, obvious solution to the problem.

I then spent an evening just playing with the loop pedal, because I seriously needed to get better at using it. Especially if I was going to play live for the class. I had a really fun set up to play with - I put one of the outputs out to a bass amp/cab, and even played around with getting the loops going, then playing drums and keys along with it. I am way too not-good at both of those instruments to even consider playing them for people at this point in my life. I began to work out how vocals could work, by singing along with my infinitely repeating loops. I had a good time and felt really positive about the project as a whole.

I didn't really realize that as my final project date got closer and closer, that I would become exponentially more nervous about the whole situation - if I completely bombed the performance, I had nothing else to fall back on. This was my project. Everyone else had such well established thingliness to their projects, and here I was planning on playing a heap of instruments at once.

I decided that the bass wasn't entirely necessary - it was more or less mirroring 2 of the guitar parts I was already going to be playing, the bass didn't sound all that fantastic running through my guitar setup, and to top it all off, I drive a very small car that totally wasn't going to fit all of the gear I'd need to haul and I had just gotten stitches 2 days prior and was feeling a bit apprehensive about carrying cabinets.

It took a bit of time to set up, since I had to make sure everything was working and at decently proper levels. I had a dented Shure SM58, my iPod (looping a small piece of the Neuromancer audiobook, read by William Gibson), and my knock off SG running into the mixer. I maniupulated my guitar's pickup selection, volume, and tone controls to lend a different character to each of my loops. For those of you keeping score, in the years since this ACTLab project, I have removed the stereo jack, re-enabled the switch, replaced the caps with orange drops, and swapped out the weak, stock neck pickup with a GFS Mean 90 (humbucker sized P-90). The stereo thing was definitely cool, but completely a pain to play with live - recording it was cool to use initially, but difficult to work with for any punching in that may have arisen. The mixer was running into a Line6 DL4 Loop Pedal.

I opted to record the piece in a more comfortable setting, taking advantage of the recorded nature to create multiple independent but inter-related loops with the loop pedal, and using the flexibility that affords me to present the mix in a slightly more controlled manner. However, I should point out that for the most part, I have tried to be mostly hands off with the recording, so as not to interfere with the live nature of the thing. My use of multiple tracks in the recording was mostly for separation purposes and each one is comprised of another track of looping layers, they're vocal and additional lead guitar loops. I felt that this would enable me to present a more satisfying recording. The vocals for the recording I had to record through one of the telephone mics I made in my first project, because I was short an XLR cable and figured that my telephone would lend a certain character I wasn't going to get with the SM58, V57M, or that other random semi-awful mic I have around here.

So what you hear are 3 main tracks - one that is the majority of the guitar, including lead and rhythm, one that is just lead guitar, looped in to augment the other guitar track with more guitar tracks, because I felt like it just wasn't big enough on its own, and finally one track of vocals, also looping on top of themselves. In my current mix, I've left off the Neuromancer clip. I like it, and I liked it, but I'm not sure about how I feel about how it fits in the mix. The clip is from when Molly gives Case one of the shurikens he had been eyeing, the line I sampled was from the reveal- "Beneath a green t-shirt, he found a bright, nine-pointed star. 'A souvenir,' Molly said,'I noticed you were always looking at them." I feel like the shuriken and all it entails in the context of the novel works in a sort of comforting similarity with the content here, just I have doubts as to whether or not just coming out and dropping the line in it is entirely necessary.