What I realized last night after re-reading the entire thread is that the problem we're ALL dealing with here is a matter of semantics. I never altered my personal point of view throughout this thread, but I found my words contradicting themselves many times, because the semantical ground was shifting underneath me like an earthquake. One minute this word means X, then the next minute it means Y, and then later on it means X + Y or neither one. In the same context, nearly everyone here contradicted themselves over and over. Our views were not changing, but the words were changing their meaning as people responded with challenges in which they were using the same words differently.
In keeping with my former posts, in which I tried to lay out some definitions for the purpose of THIS discussion (not to limit anything or divide anything), I'd call the "loopers" who do detailed work with slicing and dicing of loops right down to the level of individual sounds and notes (or shorter in some cases) not "loopers" but samplers. They're working on the sample level. Again, I know that's an arbitrary term in an arbitrary position here, but we've over-stressed these words through trying to say specific points with them, only to have our points dashed by other usages.
Defining the words isn't fun. It's more fun simply to say "don't try to tell me anything at all," and that's ok, yet here we are, each and every one of us trying to say "don't tell me what to think," while we are telling each other what WE think. And everyone is taking it as if everyone else is telling them "you must think my way."
It's an interesting discussion. I've learned a lot, and I knew a lot to begin with. (so now I'm just exploding with knowledge!
) But I'm convinced that most of us actually are agreeing on most of these points. I honestly started out talking about Apple Loops, since that was the tone of the OP's concerns. (so we recommended he go with Logic and have a nice day) That was my original intention of the word "loopers." I've never considered creative work such as Negativland or most of the hip-hop stuff to be mere copy-paste or drag & drop. Needless to say, the myriad electronic experiments of the 1930's through the 1990's were labors of dedication, with emphasis on the "labor."
Mozart's random music was just one example of probably thousands in which people entertained themselves with creatively-worked-out puzzles in music. Bach's canons sometimes had solutions that nobody found until fairly recently. I'm not sure they've all been solved. Naturally, a canon was the bone-daddy of all loops. But canons required more skill than even regular composition. None of those puzzles has anything in common with Apple Loops, especially when you consider that the composer who made the puzzle generally wrote the music in it, too. Theme & Variation has also been a staple of music, at least since the days of Palestrina. Bach composed canzoni and chaconnes that repeated with widely differing arrangements on each repeat. Nothing new there, but again, that's not looping, Garageband style.
So, my little attempts at finding some order here were fruitless, but if we could all have accepted some common language with which to express ourselves, a lot of angst would have been prevented, I think, for when I tried to define the word "looping," the action I had in mind was basically dragging and dropping Apple Loops to create a song. And the thing is, I have nothing against Apple Loops or the people who enjoy using them! That's quite all right! I've played with them myself. Lord knows I own (or license) tens of thousands of them. I just was making a statement that there is little similarity between dragging & dropping those and writing or performing music. But who would say otherwise?
My most accurate statement in this thread was
Oh, I have my opinions on the subject, but it would be totally non-productive to state them. That came on about page 6. Maybe I should have left it at that, but I'm glad I continued. I think that even just talking about this was educational, since we all said things that were very important to us. And I learned more than anything that our technology and processes have dramatically outpaced the language we use to describe them. I think that's always been the case in music. Many people here may not know that there are treatises from 200 years ago on how to play trills written by Bach vs. those written by Mozart. And even THOSE are just opinions. In the end, it takes playing a lot of either one to really figure out how you want to do those trills. My point being that the word "trill" is an impossibly simple description of an impossibly complex musical action. The words just don't get us there.
So, keep on loopin', composin', decomposin', slicing, dicing, icing, pricing, mousing and grousing. (Trilling, too) It's a new year, and I hope it's a happy one for everyone here.
Best wishes to a gang I'm proud to be a member of,
Shooshie
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