Loop Around The House - An Adventure in Delay

This is really fun, although by the end it sounds completely crazy. But in order to really appreciate what's going on here, you have to understand the difference between looping and delaying an audio track.

Looping is where you record a sample, and then repeat it for as long as you want. It's the backbone of most hip hop and electronic music. In most cases, the sample is pre-recorded, even when it's played live. Some artists - most often beat boxers - record the sample live though, and then control the loop with a foot pedal. Other artists in different genres have also done this too, like KT Tunstall. In all of these cases, the loop is used as a backing track - so you're playing the whole thing yourself! Totally fun.

The difference between those tracks and the video I want to talk about today... is that this one is not using a foot pedal, or loops. It's using a long delay. A delay is more like an echo: have you ever been on top of a mountain, and yelled something really loud towards another mountain? When that happens, it echos everything back at you, with the delay time defined by the distance it takes the sound to travel. It it was sufficiently loud enough, the sound that echoes back will bounce back from the mountain you stand on, and repeat again and again...until it fades out. A delay effect is essentially doing the same thing: repeats the sound, but each time it repeats, it fades away a little bit. In short, there are two settings to a delay effect - the time it takes for the delay to repeat the signal (the distance between the mountains), and the number of times it repeats it until it completely fades away (how "loud" you're screaming at the mountains).

So when is the delay effect used? It's most often used on vocals and guitars, but with much, MUCH shorter delay times. The most famous examples would probably be earlier U2 songs like this one. In this song, the guitar is delayed the whole entire time. The Edge is actually playing about half of the notes you are hearing: the rest is the delayed notes. Notice that it sounds almost machine gun like, and it plays over itself while it chugs along at a really controlled pace. This is more or less the "typical" way of using the delay effect (back then this was really cutting edge though). The time it takes to return the signal is so short, that the return signal starts even before you've finished playing the original note.

Getting back to the actual video I want to show - this video uses a delay effect instead of a looping effect. It has the delay time set EXTREMELY long, with the time it takes to fade away at a maximum range. In other words, if you screw up, you can't just re-do it... you have to start over, because it will keep returning that signal back at you until you turn everything off, or until it fades away on it's own. But then again, if it was any other way this video wouldn't really work - you have to have the older sounds fade away at some point, unless you just want completely un-listenable cacophony.

Looping Around The House from Si on Vimeo.