Vocal Looping Workshop for The Peabody Trust
So my first job as an independent consultant has been to provide workshops as part of a music production course called On Track funded by the Peabody Trust for 18-24 year olds. It’s been a bit of an experiment, it’s a pilot and I’ve just been the luckiest person to have pretty amazing friends.
Last Wednesday, my friend Kassia came up from Brighton especially for us to do a vocal looping workshop for the clients.
Quite honestly I wasn’t sure what to expect, I got that it involved pedals, I got that there would be vocals, but that was about it.
Hell of a lot more to it than that though. Wow. Kassia gave us an example of what she does.
She basically layered up sounds like some sort of beautiful tiered cake, or like building a sculpture from armature to varnish. She built up vocal beats, sounds, singing, and then improvised song over all of this while simultaneously bringing in or cutting out some of the sounds she was looping.
I watched these young men be just as blown away as me by it. It’s like watching colours being built up. Astonishing.
Then Kas got us all involved by starting again with each person making a sound or beat into the microphone that she could loop. She then sang over this again. Matt, the tutor of the production part of the programme was equally astounded. I don’t think any of us had expected to be so inspired.
Kas and I left the building and went to get a coffee and talk over what next.
I think I was high on that day for the next three hours. We talked so fast you’d have needed to rewind and play in slow motion to hear everything we said.
And the best bit is that the clients, these young men, very much into produced music, synthesised sounds, got to watch something actually emerge from their own imaginations.
Can’t really find more words right now, if I do I’ll add them. But it’s getting to be that I’m running out of adjectives for days as glorious as these.
Check out her myspace: http://www.myspace.com/buntylooping
All photos copyright Tristan Giblin
