Out Of The Loop by Richard Garrett (Wales) published on 2013-12-05T15:21:21Z A few years ago now, summers in England, and particularly in Wales, were littered with events known as free festivals. At such an event, a few hundred people would gather together in a field for a weekend and have experiences. To accompany these, there was always music and no festival was complete without the looping guitarist. The looping guitarist was a guy who, inspired by Robert Fripp and John Martyn and unconsciously channelling Terry Riley, would set up on a small sound stage at about 2 a.m. with an acoustic guitar and a Roland Space Echo and noodle into the night until the last of his audience slumped into unconsciousness. The technique employed was simply to improvise some phrases into a long, slowly decaying echo, soaked in reverb, and then play along to whatever came back out of the speakers. Lying in my tent, listening to these pleasant modal wanderings bouncing about a chilly field, it occurred to me that it might be more interesting if the accompaniment could vary – still using events that the guitarist had already played but not necessarily repeating them in the order in which they had occurred, or one that he or she could predict. These thoughts came back to me when I started to experiment with hexaphonic guitar and inspired the design of my first piece for this instrument, called Out of the Loop. Sound is recorded simultaneously from the conventional pickup on an electric guitar and from a hexaphonic pickup via a breakout box. The conventional sound is heard in real time but the six channels from the hex pickup are stored in a buffer on computer. The computer then chooses events from the different strings and plays them back at varying times to form an accompaniment. The accompanying sounds are pitched shifted away from the original as the piece develops. Stereo reduction of eight-channel original. Software uses MAX 6 and IRCAM Mubu. Breakout Box by Bill Baxendale (http://billbax.110mb.com/) Genre Electroacoustic