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Photos Rob Phelps
Vocalist uses the Echoplex to clone himself in live performance. |
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Machine dreams
Jon Arterton’s wishes come true
with Echoplex ‘looping’ device
By Rob Phelps
Banner Staff
What could be more entertaining than Jon Arterton singing?
Two Artertons … or three … or 23, all singing at the same time.
The conductor of the Outer Cape Chorale, member of the late, great a cappella group The Flirtations and popular solo vocalist will perform this musical magic trick Monday, Jan. 31, as the headline act for Coffeehouse at the Mews, starting at 8 p.m. in the Mews Restaurant, 429 Commercial St. (For other Arterton shows, see sidebar on page 36.)
Arterton will waive the waving of a magician’s wand and pulling rabbits out of a hat for an ordinary microphone and an Echoplex, a digital recording device that lets him sing along with his own voice.
“I dreamed of this machine long before I heard about it,” he says. “When I’m singing in a concert or in a vocal workshop setting, I’ll sometimes ask different parts of the audience to sing different lines over and over, making different layers that fit together to create a full texture of sounds. With different pockets of people doing different parts, we get four- or six-part harmony. I always dreamed I could find a machine that would allow me to do that [on my] own.
“I’ve always been interested in the kind of work Bobby (“Don’t Worry, Be Happy”) McFerrin does,” he says. “What one single solo vocalist can do on stage to create a rewarding experience for the audience in an extended kind of program.”
Now Arterton can be a one-man boy band. He can do Diana Ross, backed by his own version of Motown’s famed “wall of sound.” He can become a symphony orchestra.
At the Mews, Arterton will perform, single-voicedly, numbers ranging from “Once in a Lifetime,” “Chain of Fools” and “Sweet Dreams” to Johann Pachelbel’s “Cannon in D.”
With the Echoplex, Arterton makes short recordings, or “loops,” of his voice, repeating them while adding layers of harmony or percussive sounds on top, then making more loops with more layers that he strings together to create a fresh, new song.
He calls his dream machine a “looping device,” and says, “If you go to a website called Loopers Delight you will see that there’s a whole subculture of musicians who are loopers.” Mostly they’re guitarists, he says. The Gibson guitar company now owns the Echoplex company.
Looping sprung out of the experimental music scene of the 1950s. “John Cage and the like would take old reel-to-reel tape recorders and set them up and actually cut a loop or recording tape that would go through the machine over and over again. Brian Eno was a rocker who did that. You know Laurie Anderson’s ‘Oh, Superman…,’” he sings, nodding to say, “that one too.”
All kinds of musicians loop with the Echoplex in studios. But Arterton believes he’s the only person in the world to use it in an a cappella vocal performance.
He typically starts with a simple few bars of rhythm — “ch-kah, ch-kah, ch-kah-chuh” — then adds some instrumental-style background — “dum, da, dee-dum, da” — then starts in with lyrics and layers on harmony. He can even play his loop as background, jazzing around over the top without recording anything more.
“A lot of people think I’ve got pre-recorded sounds in here already,” he says, laughing.
It’s like the old days, when phonograph record players were brand new and enterprising salesmen took them on the road to put on demo shows. Audience members frequently peeked under the table or behind the curtains to see if someone was throwing their voice at the machine like a ventriloquist. Audiences nowadays accept the reality of recording devices, but not everyone is prepared to expect what someone like Arterton is capable of doing with them.
Arterton’s no hoax. There are no rabbits up his sleeves. In performance, he will sing each loop and layer it right before the audience, even though all the layers of sound played together by the end of each song will fool every ear in the house.
For the Banner, Arterton demos a few bars without the Echoplex, which he’s plugged into a digital effects processor called Voice Works. This accessory lets him retool his own voice into more than 100 different voices, like “Up an Octave,” “Down an Octave,” “Little Girl,” “Gregorian” (a chanting monk), “Helium” (a.k.a. balloon sucking), “Barbershop” (with instant four-part harmony), “Church Choir,” “Radio Voice” and “Jazz Guys.”
Singing without the machine, he finds his voice “sort of flat.” He’s not talking about pitch here, but tone: the difference between singing in an acoustically perfect concert hall or a hall closet.
His interest in the Echoplex stems from his love for a cappella singing and vocal arranging. He did all the arrangements for the Flirtations, that critically praised, popular group of openly gay male vocalists.
“When I learned how to arrange for three voices a cappella,” he recalls, “I learned a lot about the craft of arranging. Most chords are made up of three voices. You’ve got a melody, a bass line, and one other part to make up this three-part chord, so it’s a wonderful puzzle.”
The Echoplex is where all his arranging skills come into play now. Arterton writes all of his own sheet music on his computer. “Some of the pieces I’ve spent 15 to 20 hours on.”
He first gets each piece down “vertically,” like on a conductor’s score with each bar of each loop layer printed one above the other on the page, and then he goes back, “chops it up,” and writes it out horizontally, “as I would need to read it in performance.”
He can’t afford to make any mistakes in his writing. If the first loop doesn’t line up rhythmically and harmonically with any of the ones layered on top of it, he’s got a mess on his hands.
That’s especially tough in performance, he says, “because while you’re performing, your brain is going, ‘should I start over?’ It’s like life: ‘Should I make the best of a bad situation, or shall I, ah —?” He spreads his palms open wide, as if to say, “what other choice do you have?”
That brings him to another machine dream.
“I’m thinking more of this in terms of theater than as a music device,” he says. “When I think about that, the first piece I want to do is about how life repeats itself, and how life circles back, how things come back around to you.”
But staging theatrical loops is still on Arterton’s wish list.
For now, he’s busy practicing for his first-ever, full-length performance. What most excites him about the show at the Mews, he jokes, is “getting through it. Having it over with. This will be the first time that I will have done more than one or two songs in a row with the machine in front of an audience.” He says he can’t think of a better place to bring it on than at Coffeehouse.
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In the Arts
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Jan 27th, 2005