There is no delay here. The piece is for guitar and tape, with a bass and twelve guitar tracks on the tape.

Same idea, whether using a delay or simply recording separate tracks and timing them to play back at a certain time, which would be like Les Paul's little black box.

D.P. R I don't think it's the same idea. I remember reading that Reich doesn't like to write pieces for just one musician. He wrote it with a guitar ensemble in mind (12 guitars and 2 basses) and it's played both ways (I've played it as a part of an ensemble. It's really fun but hard to perform. The melodic motives are easy on their own, but the rythmic complexity, not so much...). Using the tape is just a way to play it as a "soloist". Besides, you could never do it with a delay. It's impossible. The melodic motives are not repeated at regular intervals of time like a delay would, they don't start always at the same beat (or part of the beat) of the measure and they are modified throughout the piece (omitting some notes, changing the order in which they are played, etc). There are changes in time and key signatures. A delay would cause a mess (passages in Cm against repetitions in Em, 12/8 against 3/4, etc)... I understand why you thought it was delay, though. Maybe if you listen to his other pieces you'll hear all of this this better, "Eight Lines" is really pretty and I think is a good place to start. Or maybe another of his "counterpoint" pieces. My favorite is "Cello counterpoint"... and now I have to go and listen to it... :P

This is a piece by steve reich..go check it out, his piano phase is really awesome too

Pedro Dias i'm so out of it i thought that was a greenwood piece. ha! it totally does sound like reich....because it is! ha!

Hehehe, it's pretty awesome to see that jonny plays steve reich, and loves contemporary music..

actually much of what you hear in king crimson is steve reich vibes

son of zelph no doubt.

Oh, and was casually strolling through the 'beer garden' with his little girl half an hour prior to walking on. Thoroughly shy, unpretentious bloke.

omg yes, almost died when i saw this

Electric Counterpoint is a composition by Steve Reich

...who like Glass is a prominent minimalist composer

Es una Gibson Les Paul :)

+ALLHAIL RASH No, it is not: each cycle or 'loop' so to say is different than the other, in intrincated counterpoints (in fact, the piece is an ensemble of 10 guitars plus two bass guitars and the musician performs the 13th instrument).

+ALLHAIL RASH It is a piece 'for guitar and tape'

+Remei Agulles Simó Can it be played with just a guitar/loopstation and no tapes?

+ALLHAIL RASH No, that's what I meant. Each instrument plays a very similar music but with slight differences in rythm in each repetition. I don't know enough music to explain it better. I also thougth he used loops, but people who understand of music say that compasses and silences are distributed in a way that makes it impossible to be played this way.

+Remei Agulles Simó The composer created another version of the same piece for an ensemble of classical guitars. You can find recordings of this version on the internet. It is quite interesting.

O jovem Mike Oldfield (assim como Robert Fripp e Brian Eno) ouviu muito bem os primeiras obras de Reich e Glass, e conseguiu intuitivamente antecipar, no ambiente do rock, uma faceta mais comunicativa (pop) latente já nos primeiros trabalhos desses minimalistas históricos. Apesar do empenho notável, a interpretação de Greenwood deixa um pouquinho a desejar pela falta de sutilezas (agógica e dinâmica), sobretudo nas transições -- algo mais que compreensível em se tratando de uma apresentação ao ar livre de uma peça que pede muita concentração do solista. Belo registro, grande músico!

De lo Mejor Amigo lml

TheBosexd he don't pretend be the same

Lol

It's actually a piece composed for guitar and tape, where the tape contains a bass and twelve guitar tracks. There is no delay here... Steve Reich, one of the fathers of minimalism, has worked on what he calls (or would probably call at least) "phasing" since the '60s. (Here "phasing" is supposed to mean something like "time shifting, possibly gradual, of the same line", not phasing as in what a phase pedal does...) He's particularly interested in the new structures emerging from these combinations (i.e. the original line and the phased one(s)). This appears in many of his works, in different shapes. You can have a go at "Come Out" and "Piano Phase" for early experiments on this. As for here, I'm not even sure he's using any effect at all; certainly no time-based effect.

If he's using 12 separate guitar tracks pre-recorded to tape, and playing back with them, nothing new to that either. Les Paul was the inventor of that with his famous black box. Some today have nothing else to do put try to pass off an old thing as if it were new to a later unsuspecting generation. That's all this is.

D.P. R That's not quite my point. (Greenwood is playing a Les Paul here; would you want to credit everything he does with it to Les Paul as well?) I'm not arguing on the fact that Les Paul invented the Les Paulverizer, I'm trying to say that there's more to that than the use of some device or technique. (And, although I don't know it, I'm sure there could have been performances with pre-recorded music prior to the invention of his black box, which just does it live. The black box isn't needed for that.) You can't dismiss the whole piece saying "No big deal" just because the composer didn't invent every little thing that allowed to record or perform it. Multi pre-recorded tracks is not "all this is". Steve Reich's music is filled with new elements. (At least, new back then since he started composing in the '60s and this piece is from 1989.) I mean he's one of the 4-5 guys credited for inventing minimalism, which is one of the most significant development -musical, not technical- of the 20th century! (And Radiohead is, at times and in some ways, the love child of minimalism and pop/rock...) In the end, I guess I actually don't see your point. And in any case, whatever my point is, I only wanted to make it once so sorry about the multiple messages about the delay thing; I hadn't seen I was talking to the same person! Cheers

I respect the fact of listeners who like what he's doing, and the fact that he can play. But this kind of sound he's getting we used to play around with back in the '70's and '80's when we got a digital delay effect for our guitars. And there's certainly been previous guitarists that recorded this multi-layered technique in song solos. The guitarist for Rush was one of the early ones, Hendrix probably the earliest with Electric Ladyland.

As for the 'Minimalist' label that some '60's era music critic in NYC latched onto for this style, that meaning wasn't anything new either, since that's the approach for orchestral composition, i.e., more than one instrument playing only small parts that sounded together create the underlying harmony (chords), rhythm, and melody. So basically what I'm saying, like my previous posts, most electric guitarists in those days experimented with this technique at some point, but never considered it some independent 'style' on its own.