Daktari

Hi there,

I play around local bars and restaurants and I use a Boss Looper which is very good in a way but I am thinking of changing to the Digitech JAM MAN. The only reason being, the Jam Man has a memory card slot which means it will then hold upto 99 looped backing tracks. At the moment, My Boss Looper just has 10 spaces before I have to start deleting and starting from scratch.

At first, I was happy with this because I wanted the tracks to be disposable, kind of throw away. However, sometimes, it works out really good and it would be nice to save them to re-use. Right now I have eight pre-looped tracks, mainly for reggae type songs which I sing and play solo guitar to. The other two spaces I save for live looping which is a lot more exciting. I just feel that the audience would soon get fed up of watching each song build layer by layer and so most of what I play is just live one guitar and vocals, maybe hitting a tambourine or cabassa with my foot sometimes.

One of my favourite reggae tracks to loop live is 'LIQUIDATOR'. A really gold old reggae tune. I start with rhyhm guitar which I make sound like an organ, then I make percussive sounds by banging and scratching on the strings near the pickups. Then an octave down to do the bass and then finally a steel drum type sound to play the melody.

Loads of solo musicians just mail order some backing tracks and play and sing along to that but that's just getting too close to karaoke for me.

Whatever lights your candle I guess.

Good Luck, Gordon. ONE MAN-