Students at elementary and middle school levels are used to taking home their own original artwork from school. But, they rarely have the opportunity to bring home any original music. Looping can easily preserve the creative contributions of students. Find out how to use a looper in your classroom for high student engagement and success.
by James Oshinsky
Teachers can easily lead collaborative creative group activities in Language Arts classes with “shared stories.” What is the musical equivalent, and how can we share this work with parents and administration? Adding loopers to our classroom toolbox is an innovative way to accomplish both goals.
by Jim Oshinsky
In Language Arts classes, teachers can easily lead collaborative creative group activities with “shared stories.” Each student in turn adds a sentence to the story, which can lead to spontaneous shifts in the narrative that are entertaining and engaging. In the end, the students have a creative product in which they all share authorship. What is the musical equivalent, and how easily can classroom music teachers provide an analogous experience?
Picture a timeline. In a literary narrative, the timeline is most often linear as we follow characters and events. The story builds into its own future. In a musical “narrative,” it is possible for students to add to each other’s melodies and motifs, but this would require a high level of technical skill to remember, reproduce and relate to their peers’ contributions. Adding vertically to the timeline rather than linearly is a much simpler task, and it relies on having a steady rhythm as a scaffold to build on.
The instructor starts a metronome to provide a steady pulse. The first student is given a few seconds to “noodle around” along with the pulse with the goal of settling in on a simple repeated pattern that leaves space for their classmates to add their own ideas. Once the student lands on a workable pattern, they repeat it for the duration of the activity.
The next student repeats the same process, with the freedom to “noodle” and experiment with rhythm, settling in on their own repeated pattern. As more students enter the group composition, the sound will get denser, and the “holes” in the pattern become somewhat more of a puzzle to find and fill tastefully. The options for participation will always include supporting the basic pulse, adding multiples or divisions of the pulse, adding harmony, answering a phrase in conversational style, and imitating or doubling an existing phrase.
Some contributions, such as a counter-rhythm or triplet over duple meter phrase, open up the whole composition to new areas of exploration. Eventually, every student will have contributed a pattern to the aggregate whole, and each student is repeating their own phrase while being guided by a common pulse. This is a fine metaphor for inclusiveness, in that every person’s contribution is welcome and helps enrich the other contributions via contrast and support.
If the activity above is done as a live rhythm exercise, the pattern-on-pattern development builds until everyone plays. The teacher can dramatically stop the whole group on one definitive downbeat, or act as the producer in the mixing studio, and temporarily fade down certain student’s parts to better hear the interplay of other parts. The piece can end with a fade out, a crescendo, or by having students drop out in reverse order to how they entered the music.
Some groups will have difficulty sustaining a reliable rhythm for a sufficient time to permit everyone in the whole group to contribute a part. However, each person can likely play their part in good rhythm, at least once.
A looping pedal is a sampler that will capture the audio signal between two taps – one to start recording/sampling and one to stop. The looper can store a captured sample for later replay, or it can immediately replay the sample any number of times, from one to infinity.
A sample that replays over and over is a loop.
In its most straightforward use, a looper can be a metronome. The loop repeats, and the period between repetitions sets a regular beat. The loop may contain a tapped pulse, which would sound exactly like a metronome, with precise subdivisions of its period (e.g., taps every four beats).
But a looper can do much more than a metronome. Any phrase can be captured and repeated, so the looper can function as a drummer, playing rhythms more complex than a simple pulse. The looper can function as a bass player, repeating a bass line. Put these together, and the looper can function as a rhythm section, offering a rich accompaniment in regular time.
As an aide to improvisation, a looper can hold your ideas while you develop complementary ideas. Let’s say you have a drumbeat in mind to start a musical piece. You can record and loop the drumbeat using mics and a drumset, electronic drums, or vocal percussion sounds. Now that drumbeat loops and repeats, so you can work out the next part in relationship to the drumbeat. You can try out several bass lines, for example, and when you settle on one that is a “keeper,” you can capture it and add it to the sounds being looped. You can next work out more aspects of an arrangement, adding guitar, or vocal lines, or harmonies. This is your “scratch pad” to experiment with multi-part musical textures and layered arrangements. The addition of more layers to an existing loop is called overdubbing.
What makes the looper so convenient is that it is designed to capture music in real time, on the fly. Loopers are often floor pedals, similar in design to other effects electric guitarists use. There is a foot switch on the looper box that is dedicated to starting the recording, and a foot switch dedicated to stopping the recording. If the looper is set to immediately repeat whatever is captured, there is also a foot switch that stops the output of the looped sounds, while allowing the original signal to still be heard. There is a foot switch that will undo the last recorded loop in case there was an error, and a foot switch that erases the whole recording to allow you to start over. Most loopers have memory locations that permit you to store loops and play them on demand or move them to other devices.
The one new skill to learn in using a looper is the timing of the foot taps in capturing a phrase. If you tap to start too soon, the rhythm of your loop will drag from the extra time at the beginning. Tap to start too late and you will fail to capture your first sounds. Tap to end too late and you will distort the period of your phrase and be out of rhythm. Tap to end too soon and your phrase will be rushed. Some of these errors can be useful in practice. It is easy to play along with a regular beat. It is a challenge to play in non-standard time and feel the beat in other ways.
There are many digital samplers on the market, in many sizes and at greatly varying price points. I have an older model call the Digitech Jam Man. I like it because it also functions as a small mixer and permits multiple inputs. I can have a guitar, bass or keyboard plugged in through the 1/4-inch cable input, a microphone plugged in through the XLR input, and a mp3 player plugged in through the 1/8 inch cable input. This unit also has 100 memory locations for storing loops, and an SD card and a USB output for transferring loops to other devices. There is also a click track metronome available, as well as a small library of preset rock and jazz rhythms.
Newer loopers have the added feature of being able to address multiple loop locations at once, and they also have the capacity to trigger stored loops in a set sequence, or toggle back and forth between loops. This would allow a performer to create separate loops for the A, B and C sections of a piece and toggle between them in real time (think intro, verse and chorus).
Loopers allow you to modify the speed of a captured phrase without modifying the pitch. If you input a piece you would like to learn, you can slow it down to hear it more distinctly, or work on it while you build up to a faster pace.
Students at elementary and middle school levels are used to taking home their own original artwork from school. But they rarely have the opportunity to bring home any original music. Looping can easily preserve the creative contributions of students. It especially lends itself to collaborative group compositions/improvisations.
The teacher needs to be adept in the use of a digital sampler/looping pedal. The pedal’s input is a microphone, and its output is connected to a small amplifier so it can be heard in the room.
The teacher models a rhythm activity without the looper. The teacher provides a beat, which the students tap on their laps in unison. The teacher provides calls, which the students echo back in call and response manner. The teacher then introduces the variation of the activity so that in place of an exact repetition of the teacher’s call, each student comes up with his or her own unique rhythmic response – call and answer instead of call and echo back. After all students have had a chance to provide a unique answer, the teacher repeats the activity, starting with just a beat and no calls. Volunteers are solicited to provide a call. The teacher captures that call with the looper, using a period twice as long as the student’s call. For example, the student gives a four-beat call, and the teacher adds another four beats of silence before ending the recording of the loop. What repeats is the student’s call, followed by four beats of silence. This allows the rest of the class to echo each classmates’ recorded call, or to answer and converse with it.
Another class looper activity, similar to a shared story, builds a textured rhythm one layer at a time. The first person creates a simple rhythm that is captured with the looper. The next person plays along with the looped rhythm until they “fill a hole” in the sound. The instructor adds that new contribution to the repeating loop by overdubbing, and then passes the mic to the next student. Each student listens for a new hole to fill or a new way to complement the existing looped sounds. This can include doubling a part, adding harmony, supporting the basic pulse, or creating a new layer. The group composition is easy for a teacher to assemble, and like a group story, it is a cooperative creation that all the students contribute to. It can be saved on most loopers and exported as a sound file to various media, from memory sticks to CDs.
Students at many age levels are fascinated by hearing their own sounds recorded and played back to them. This can be an opportunity for the teacher to compliment the students for an aspect of their musicality that the student was not aware of. For example, their intensity of expression, or their unique timbre.
To use a looper in a classroom setting, there are technical and equipment considerations to master. A looper is a recorded sound source, as is a CD player or a phonograph. It needs amplification to be heard in a classroom setting. This means the output of the looper needs to be wired to an amplifier. The simplest way of doing this is to obtain a small guitar amplifier and the kind of connecting cables that guitarists commonly use. This is often called a ¼-inch jack, referring to the diameter of the plug. On the input side, the most versatile component will be a microphone, connected to the looper with a similar ¼-inch jack. Many microphones are equipped with a different type of cable connector suitable for a PA system. This three-pronged connector is called an XLR jack. If your looper does not have a separate XLR input, there are adaptors for XLR cables that step the signal down to a ¼ inch output. Cables are named with a reference to gender, based on whether the end has a receptacle or a plug. The necessary adaptor converts a male XLR end to a male ¼ inch end.
The only loopers I know of that do not require external amplification are the ones that are cell phone apps. A popular looping app for cell phones is called Loopy. It uses the phone’s internal microphone for recording, and its output can come through the phone’s internal speaker, or that output can be sent to an external wireless Bluetooth speaker with no need for cables and additional equipment.
More information about looping as a musical practice can be found at the “looper’s delight” website, https://loopers-delight.com/loop.html.
Contributor
James Oshinsky, Ph.D. is a psychologist and musician. He teaches improvisation at Adelphi University. Jim is the author of Return to Child, a book detailing the improvisation pedagogy of the late cellist David Darling and the organization, Music for…
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