Question and Answer

Hi Pat, First, thank you for being a continuous source of inspiration. When you played at Town Hall for the Orchestrion Tour I was amazed how quickly you were able to layer ideas with looping. Limiting the discussion to the guitar only loops (not the pitch to MIDI controllers for the Orchestrion), can you talk a little about the equipment & process for live guitar loops? Are you using Ableton Live to create the loops? What MIDI foot controllers? Thank you, Jim Golden

Hi Jim. Ableton Live is a pretty great program and unique in this department. I figured out how to do it by watching a bunch of instructional videos and finding people who were good at Ableton to help me. It is very flexible and you can really do just about anything you put your mind to, especially now with Max for Live built into the program. The foot controllers were custom built for the Orchestrion project - one of my main goals was not to have a computer monitor or laptop onstage, I wanted to do everything that I needed to do with my feet, keeping it sort of like a magic show. When I see guys with laptops onstage I keep thinking they are checking their email or something. It was kind of cool in 1998 for 2 months. Now there are so many other ways to do it. Thanks from Pat