I've been playing around with the chord looper, but for me, it's not very intrusive, and I kinda gave up on it. But after watching this chord looper video, I once again have an interest, and will be back giving it another go. This is a long, previously live video on the chord looper. (I suggest moving ahead to around the 7 minute mark)

Thanks Larry. I absolutely love the chord looper , and learned how to use it from the last video that you posted, and I very much look forward to studying this latest video.

Hey Paul, happy for you, now that you now have the SX-900.

I've used the chord looper, and I'm getting better at it, but the thing I have a problem with, is the timing. It seems like I'm always either a little behind, or ahead of playing along with the chord looper. Other than that it's a great tool, and opens up using both hands to play along.

Have fun

Yeah, it can be a little tricky…. You need to push the looper a mesure before the loop is to start and a measure before it ends. You can push the loop button anywhere with the measure.

For an exercise start with 2 bar chord sequences such ii V ( songs like Oye Como Va) then try doing 4 bar sequences , 8 bar sequences , 12 bar blues, and so forth.

I do my loops on the fly, But the great thing is you can save your chord loops too!

I used to find the looper a great tool for quickly auditioning styles with the head changes of the song. That way you concentrate on truly listening to the style and the way the fills flow rather that using any concentration on playing the changes.

But for me, the deal maker is the freedom to FULLY utilize the bender. You simply are hobbling your expression only being able to use the bender when you aren’t playing a chord change, and so many real instruments are bending ACROSS the chord boundaries, not while the chord is static.

Want great sax solos, guitar solos, fiddle solos etc., etc.?

Got to use the bender a LOT, 🎹😎

An arranger without a looper is crippled…

Really? A WHOLE bar in advance? Roland’s looper record mode can be started up to about the beginning of the fourth beat of the preceding bar, just like fills can be. And the start and stop of the loop the same leeway. I don’t understand… what could possibly be the need to set this up a whole bar ahead?

It might be worth slowing the tempo way down and experimenting with just how close to the bar boundary you can get the looper to engage…

Many always hear the end product and never fully understand what happens behind the scenes to create such beautiful music. One simple trick (as already suggested above) to get close to perfection is ... record at slower speeds to make sure all notes fall in the right place - then speed it up :-)

I do not think that records (which are supposed to be "perfect", in contrast to live concerts) are recorded in slow-motion and played back faster.

Actually records are recorded in many takes, with each player/singer alone (listening for feedback to a tentative mix of the recordings of the others components of the band).
Often a single riff is a collage of many different takes, which are only "perfect" for a few measures (and NOT for the whole verse/chorus/song, no matter how hard you try again and again).

The complete final record is assembled in the mixer (= DAW nowadays), where many effects are added as well. What you hear NEVER happened altogether at the same time in the same place. It is only an illusion that is necessary to have the perfection humans cannot produce on their own.

If the music is electronic, then it is likely that NOBODY ever played a single note. It has been simply sequenced in the DAW (with a mouse, or possibly edited after playing a few notes on the keyboard, even by very bad players that could never play live in an acceptable way).

Playing in slow motion rarely will produce the right feeling that makes a piece of music sound good and authentic.

Sorry groovy, but that’s not really true any more. Pitch and tempo transposition has leaped forward by huge amounts in the last decade. Tempo adjustment can be (within limits) adjusted completely undetectably, not only can pitch for single notes be corrected, but notes WITHIN chords and complex recordings can be corrected and adjusted. And electronic music often has as much that was originally played on a keyboard and then possibly edited and quantified as it has made by inputting with a mouse.

There just aren’t any rules any more. Guitar loops with the wrong chord and wrong tempo for a project can be undetectably changed to fit a new project, tracks laid down by real players can be quantized to rhythmic perfection (or imperfection!), you can input synth parts to a DAW merely by humming them into a mic!

And yes, god’s walk among us, there are players who achieve perfection (or whatever the producer is looking for) in one uncut take. You find a lot of these over on the jazz side, but at the top end, studio musicians can still do great work in one take..!

What HAS changed is the option if a studio god is outside the budget of a small production to, as you say, ‘comp’ together whatever will pass for ‘perfection’ (truth is, there’s no such thing!). And nowadays, yes there’s even the option to slow the DAW down a bit while audio is recorded and then, just like sequencing, speed it back up to nominal. And, in truth, this has been done even on hit records for decades with multitrack tape decks. There’s nothing REALLY new under the sun!

But, to finish, I think you actually missed the point of AJ’s post… the thread is about using chord loopers with an arranger. Modern chord loopers allow you to store and link the loops with Registrations, but most arrangers at this time don’t have the tools to edit the loop as easily as you can a sequence. So his post was about recording the loop by hand at a slower tempo, so the player can take the care to be as precise as possible before it is used at full tempo, because it can’t really be edited afterwards without a ton of bother.

Ditto!

The sad part is ... actual musicians and creators are not having as much 'value' today as they did yesterday due to 'technology' which has 'eased' music creation and put most of it in the hands of studio engineers and 'techies' who are getting more 'relevance' in today's music world .... again I say, unfortunately ... in my opinion!