The first person I saw using a loop pedal (and he's still the best I've seen) is David Ford. He's a singer-songwriter from Eastbourne who sometimes plays live with other musicians but mostly solo using the loop machine.
Update: David is actually mentioned on the Wikipedia Live Looping page as an artist 'known for their use or advocacy of the technique'. So it's not just me....
To give you a feel for what's possible this video for 'Go To Hell' is a single take video & recording - it starts with layering percussion, then
his voice and then adds in piano and guitar. All done solo with a loop machine/pedal.
David Ford - "Go to Hell" Original Signal Recordings
The music may not be to your taste but you'll hopefully admire the craft.
But if you want to see him doing something more familiar, here's Hotel California
Unfortunately this is a live
recording standing too close to the
speakers for great sound quality, but it does give a great view of how he loops
all the different instruments into the song.
This was part of a charity concert where every year he sets himself a
challenge to play an 'impossible' cover song, solo & live - his 'Everest'. And this is using more than one loop machine (see below)
He's still exploring and developing his looping - in 2019 he released an album showcasing the 'elaborate employment of this technique'
Every couple of years or so, I find myself taken by the urge to add a little more paint to my unfinished masterpiece. It’s a project that began around 2002 when I acquired my first loop pedal. These helpful little boxes allow solo performers such as myself to create more interesting musical arrangements than would otherwise be possible with just a single instrument and one pair of hands. Essentially they record little snippets of sound and play them back over and over. Then by adding the right parts at the right times, you can build a whole lot of noise without having to spend any time around other musicians. Looping soon became a major part of my live performances and much of whatever success I have had sprang from my early adoption and elaborate employment of this technique.
But I was never satisfied with the technology available. There has never been a machine that does all the things I need. I want to fill the stage with instruments, loop them all together, have them stay in time, be able to bring different parts in and out during the song, without sacrificing sound quality and without using computers. Once there’s a computer on stage, it becomes the smartest member of the band and the temptation is to let it handle more and more of the difficult and complicated work until eventually you wind up somewhere along the road to karaoke.
So I have taken it upon myself to go about modifying existing machines and building new ones. Every time I think I can go no further, I wake in the night struck by the notion that some obsolete piece of ‘90s technology might be re-purposed to allow me to play bass parts using my feet, thereby expanding the list of viable looper songs. And then I’m back in again, hunched over a soldering iron so that I might make the sound of a full band all by myself. These recordings represent my nearest attempt.
So far.
From <https://david-ford.bandcamp.com/album/one-man-live>
You can see these Heath Robinson machines on this thread - https://twitter.com/davidfordisdead/status/1177506724946694144
Being totally unmusical but loving live music, I find it totally amazing that he can record all of those random bits of noise which slowly reveal themselves as a multi-layered song and then he keeps adding to it while singing along to the parts he's already recorded. Mind blowing.
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