[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PERFORMING WITH RUPERT]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: My name is Toby Summerfield. I'm a guitar player and bass player in Chicago.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PERFORMING WITH RUPERT]

I think it’s hard to be a musician and not be an improviser at some level like at first musicians had to be improvisers because there weren’t instruments and there weren’t genres or pedagogy to deal with. In my experience, the best musical experiences have some sense of that. I don't know, but really preciousness is the word but like a temporal quality like it only exists while it’s happening.

When I first got a sampling pedal, it was because I was playing in this band with no bass player, and there was a lot of a quick compositional need for like a fourth voice happening, a bass line or riff or whatever that tended that a trumpet player and I could deal with on top of, so I bought this Line 6 Pedal. I’d looked at -- There’s a Boss pedal and there’s the boomerang and all these other things, and I went and played them all and this is the one that made the most sense to me. I didn't know what it was originally but it just felt sensible I guess. And then, after playing with it for a while in almost exclusively that context where it’s like play a riff and sample it and play over it, I sort of worked on a bigger vocabulary with it where it’s sort of became its own instrument to a degree. I like Headrush pedals and I like Boomerangs and I’ve really dug the Boss pedal, the Boss Sampling Station pedal, and I’d like to check out the Echoplex, where you can link a whole bunch of musicians together like the band Battles does that really expertly, but those are really a lot of bread.

One of the things I really like about it is you have this pre-sample delay function to give you like [DEMONSTRATES CONCEPT]. See if it’s happening yet.

There’s a lot of fun to be made. I mean it shows if I’m turning knobs up and down with my feet [DEMONSTRATES CONCEPT]. So, you have this nice section where you can -- when you’re in the sampling function, you have this delay setting, so you do all this stuff.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

One of the things that I got really interested with sampling pedals was the additive stuff with different tones like “I’m Sitting in a Room” or -- What’s the other one? That’s the Lucier one and then there’s one that Steve Reich did, kind of works the same way, like you say a thing and then you say it over and over again and eventually all you hear is the sounds and no voices. So, doing something like, you know, something as simple as this like...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

...and sampling it...

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

...and then just letting it go, what you get is [INDISCERNIBLE] sounds.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

You can hear that it reinforces or it takes part. That’s because I’m doing really rhythmic. What I got really excited about was just long notes, so if you use a volume pedal and you fade in, it’ll hang on to these notes for you, soryt cloud happening.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

And just even the delay itself, not going to be really rich sounding, but as soon you start sampling it you bring out all the different tones and the sort of consonances and dissonances like these other patterns happen.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

High notes would come out and each path through the loop it gets different. You can let them really go at a spot you like, empty it out, and add new notes.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

And further, you got this whole other world happening.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

That’s sort of one end of that vocabulary that I like to use. I got it for the sake of doing like --

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

Yeah.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE LINE 6 DL4 DELAY STOMPBOX MODELER]

Or whatever, you know, that sort of setting where I’m in charge of being the riff and soloing and the trumpet player has got his part or somebody else has their part. That was the impetus and then sort of finding those sounds. I was kind of lucky because the other sampling pedals I was interested in couldn’t do that kind of stuff. This has -- it has the half time and the reverse settings which make up sort of a lot of that effect, and that pre -- the pre-delay setting.

You know, I like Brian Eno and I like the stuff that he did with Robert Fripp and being able to do that, something like that or something emulative of that like by myself is pretty cool.

You know, I’ve used two at a time before, which can be really fun because you can --

GRETCHEN HASSE: Two of these.

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: Two of these, yeah. I’ll borrow one from somebody. You can have the two like two sets of sounds happening and have them fighting each other or dealing with each other, whatever, and have it not be permanent. It would not be written into the memory of the machine, so you can turn one off and turn the other one on and then change one and not change the whole thing, which is a little bit richer as far as like the variation you can go through.