how did I get here?

 (From the Talking Heads song, which I cannot recommend highly enough.)

If you remember from a previous adventure, there's a device, usually a pedal switch on the floor, called a "looper," where you start it, play a phrase of music, and then it just plays that phrase over and over. Then you can play more phrases on top of that ("overdubbing") and create textured layers of sound, even if there's only one of you, like this guy:

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Loopers, like their sibling effects "Echo" and "Delay," started out as an actual loop of magnetic tape, and while they're all solid-state now, they've mostly kept the same user interface (UI) as the original tape loopers, because...I don't know why. A bizarre skeumorphism, maybe. And I hate it! You have to tap your foot exactly right, and sometimes you need a double-tap, and the number of taps and the LED light indicators are all mode-dependent, and it's horrible. There's no need to suffer like this: we have computers! I was resigned to getting a MIDI floor switch and figuring it all out myself, but then it turns out a few other, more motivated people have had the same opinion, and did all that work already.

The switch I ordered comes with programming to make it JFW (Just F*cking Work) with a venerable and fabulous music-making program called Ableton Live, and since the looper is backordered, I've been spending some time learning Ableton, and the tools and history of electronic/computer-driven music.

This is interesting because I've listened to a lot of electronic music over the years, and the first thing to really strike me is that the essence of electronica, long songs composed of patterns repeated with small changes applied gradually, is really a function of the hardware available in the 70s and early 80s. Synthesizers that couldn't yet sound like real instruments, and sequencers with very little memory that repeated patterns (necessarily short) on the synthesizers. I think that relatively few people had a sound in their head and invented equipment to produce it; instead, they met the equipment and thought, "What can I make with this?".

The challenge that I'm seeing now: how do you use these tools to make music that doesn't sound like all the electronically-driven music I've already heard?

It's a digression, in a way, since this started by wanting to loop violin and guitar parts, but Ableton Live was written by German artist-engineers as a performance tool (hence the "Live"), and in its UI and terminology, it actually treats ordinary studio recording as a special form of performance (which it is). But I'll need to know the app to get the most out of it, in any case.

Every so often I look up and realize the kind of rabbit-hole I'm in, and it's all because I hate the restrictions of a single type of musical hardware, that most non-guitarists wouldn't recognize anyway.