BEGINNER
If you enjoyed Steve Lawson’s initial journey into looping last month, you’re going to love this... Prepare your stomping foot!
Continuing his easy lessons in looping, the great Steve Lawson talks building more complex arrangements without having to overstretch ourselves
Welcome back! I hope you’ve been having fun with the looping exercises we were looking at last month. This time, we’re going to talk a little bit about how we can use a looper to build more complex arrangements without having to overstretch ourselves technically. It’s worth pointing out at this
Playing a ‘push’, without any kind of rhythm to play it against, is itself a really good exercise in developing your internal
Take your time over these. There are only two notes, a fifth apart, repeated and looped, but putting all of that together in a way that you’re happy to listen to for 20 minutes while we play things against point that any of these exercises can be done by recording the looped parts into a computer and looping them inside a digital audio workstation (or DAW), such as Garageband or Reaper. However, you just don’t get the option for real-time interaction that way, and you won’t get to explore the specific timing-centred clock. You can try practising this against a metronome or drum track first, too. It can sometimes help to bring our picking it may take a few attempts! Now, what chord do you think that is? The lowest note of the two is a G and the highest is a D. That might imply a G chord of some sort, right? Well, the best answer to this was learning that starting and stopping loops offers us – so let’s keep it old-school.
Let’s start this month by playing a twonote double stop – that is, two notes played at the same time – which we’re going to loop. We’ll then play various bass lines along with it in order to explore what’s possible. Here’s our first double stop: hand down onto the strings on beat 2 for a percussive hit, to help define the beat a little more. That would look like this: something Abraham Laboriel said to me many years ago when I asked him in an interview what the single best thing about being a bass player was: ‘A C chord isn’t a C chord until I say it’s a C chord’.
Without the presence of a bass note, that pair of notes could be one of several different things. Indeed, as we change the bass note under those two, we’ll hear how their function within each chord changes dramatically. Changing one note in a bass-line can completely lift – or indeed, wrong-foot – a piece of music. This exercise will allow us to explore that phenomenon without having to learn loads about complex chords and how to play them. Hurrah!
So, now that we’ve got our loop to play against, we can start adding bass notes and see what happens. While it may seem obvious that we would start with a G in the bass, I’m actually going to start with a C. The chord that will be formed by playing a C under this loop is referred to as a Csus2 – that is, a C chord where the 3rd in the chord has been replaced by the 2nd. The 2nd will be one step above the root, or in this case, the octave. So in the key of C Major, that’s a D. Now our C, G, D chord gives us a root (C) a 5th (G) and the 2nd up the octave. Intervals expanded beyond the octave are sometimes referred to as ‘compound’ intervals, so this would be a compound 2nd. Alternatively, you can name them by their extension into the next octave – so this would be a 9th. However, the problem with calling it a 9th is that in chord-naming terms that implies a completely different kind of chord, so we’re going to stick with 2nd. All clear? Good! Here’s our C against it:
Remember last month we said that the green note heads were the notes that were playing back in the looper? We have those on this stave for reference, and the black note heads are what you’re actually playing. This allows us to see how the two lines interlock: the percussive ‘hit’ on beat 2 in the loop doesn’t happen in the bassline, and the little two-note turnaround at the end of the two-bar bass line doesn’t happen in the loop. So we need to be able to anticipate the timing of the loop, and also use that percussive muted sound to help orient ourselves within the groove.
The back and forth here between what’s being played by the looper and what we’re playing against it is the essence of what is required to play with any machinebased performance tool. If it’s a sequencer, human variation is less likely to be a factor in defining what that fixed rhythm is. That said, we’ll still need to listen to a pattern and, based on that listening, start to formulate a sense of what’s happening in the groove. Then we’ll see where our line fits, either on top of or against the notes that are being played in the loop. The more sparse the machine part is, the fewer points of correction we’ll have as we go on – and the more we’ll need to train our internal clock to anticipate those rhythmic elements and play in a musical way.
Okay, let’s look at what happens when we change the bass note. We’re now going to double the length of the phrase and have a different bass note in the third and fourth bars. Let’s play it and then talk about what’s happening to the harmony (see page 52):
Right, does that sound good? That’s what matters. Before anything else, we can experiment with finding things that sound good. To paraphrase Brad Pitt, the first rule of Loop Club is to use it to make great-sounding music. Clever looping tricks were probably a useful gimmick 20 years ago when I started out gigging solo – and I’m guessing the looping thing had a pretty big appeal for some of my audience back then. However, successive generations of pop musicians using loopers – from KT Tunstall and Imogen Heap to Ed Sheeran and Beardyman – means that the gimmicky side of it is way less interesting to us and our audience than the musical possibilities are.
So here we have the results of a ‘what if’ exploration. We had a chord and a given bass note. The ‘what if’ here is:
“THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN IS THAT IT SOUNDS BAD. IN THAT CASE, SIMPLY TRY SOMETHING ELSE...”
‘What if I just change the bass note? What happens?’ Remember, the worst that can happen is that it sounds bad. That’s really not a bad outcome for an experiment. Noone will get hurt, nothing will explode, you’ll just have made a noise that’s less than ideal – which means that you simply go on to try something else.
One of my favourite things about a looper is that it allows players who aren’t particularly dexterous to experiment with more complex musical forms. It also doesn’t require us to learn hugely complex sets of harmonic theory to start that experimentation. In our case, our choice of an A was informed by the harmonic knowledge we already have,
both practically and through the lessons in this column. We know that if we’re in the key of C, any of the other natural (in other words, not sharp or flat) notes are in the same key. The practical knowledge is that, in your learning of songs, you’ll have realised that the most common chords to follow the root in any given key are the 4th, 5th and 6th chords. In this case, F Major, G Major and A minor.
I chose A, somewhat arbitrarily, and instead of worrying about whether I could rationalise it on paper, I just listened to what it did to our little progression. We’ve now gone from C, G, D, which we’ve explained is a Csus2 chord, to A, G, D which is a... What? G is seven notes above the A, and D is a compound 4th, which means 11 notes up the scale from A. There are a number of ways to label what that chord
You may recognise the harmonic movement as being based on the verse chords to ‘Lovely Day’ by the late, great Bill Withers. It’s in C Major, but there’s that b A just before the G. Again, from a theory perspective, that’s a thorny explanation b (it’s A Major7#11, if you’re taking notes!) but we’re totally unconcerned about that right now.
Here, we’re just moving around, playing patterns we’re familiar with, in and around the key of C. We can keep the loop the same and move to other keys, and we can try minor scales instead of major and see what happens (C minor is actually where implies in this context: A7sus4, Amin11, G/A... But none of them are as important as answering the question ‘Do I like it?’, because that’s the final part of our ‘what if’. I’ve chosen to do something based either on my theory knowledge or just blind chance, so now I need to make an aesthetic judgement about whether I like it or not.
Here’s a secret for you. An awful lot of amazing-sounding musicians have no idea what they’re doing. That’s not intended to absolve you of the task of finding out what you’re up to. There’s no value in making life harder for yourself by intentionally resisting the acquisition of knowledge. However, I encourage you to experiment alongside knowledge acquisition, and see that our end goal of playing great-sounding music is a pretty open-ended pursuit, and can be found through a number of intersecting paths. At any one time, our theory learning, or learning from other people’s songs, our pattern recognition and ear training can be richly supplemented by some ‘what if’ exploration. Letting our curiosity guide us can reap rich rewards.
Finally, let’s focus on what the looper is allowing us to do here. We have a singlebar loop that in no way restricts us to playing single-bar phrases against it. We can play chord progressions as long as we want, keeping the notes in the loop as the fixed notes and varying everything else in the bass-line and melody. The looper teaches us that, in any situation, the ‘givens’ are often way more fluid than we might imagine. We can even change key if we want, so long as the place we end up still makes use of those two notes. Try this line: b the A comes from), but we can try all kinds of other stuff, too. We can start to hear way more subtle and complex harmonies without needing to do a deep dive into Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory Book or spend 10 years learning how to two-handed tap these lines. Learning jazz theory and two-handed tapping are both worthy and advisable creative pursuits – but they aren’t a prerequisite for experimentation.
If the looper teaches us anything, it’s that, like Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, we can explore the rich pleasures of ‘simple lines intertwining’. Enjoy your practice, and I’ll see you next month for more loopy fun!
“IF THE LOOPER TEACHES US ANYTHING, IT’S THAT, LIKE SPINAL TAP’S NIGEL TUFNEL, WE CAN EXPLORE THE RICH PLEASURES OF ‘SIMPLE LINES INTERTWINING’”