A guitarist choosing gear is usually choosing a tone.
I like the distortion of this amp. I need the midrange of this pickup. The texture of this delay fits. The criterion sits in the character of the sound that comes out.
Follow Robert Fripp's gear history and you notice that this criterion is barely operating.
What he designed was not a tone. It was the mechanism from which sound is born.
Allan Holdsworth, written about previously here, designed the time of sound. Dimebag Darrell chose gear in order to protect attack. Both worked backward from the character of the sound that finally emerges.
Fripp stands one step before that.
Two tape recorders as a "device"
First, listen to what the device produced.
The method associated with Fripp's name is Frippertronics.
The principle is simple. Two tape recorders are set side by side, and tape is passed from the record head of one to the playback head of the other. Recorded sound plays back slightly later, and that is recorded again. Play over it and sound stacks up in layers.
He used Revox machines; a configuration combining the A77 and B77 is the known one. The idea traces back to Terry Riley's tape delay technique, and he settled it as his own method through his collaboration with Brian Eno.
What to notice here is that this device is not a tool for making a tone.
Distortion or chorus alters the texture of an input signal. Frippertronics does not alter texture. What it alters is the time structure in which sound exists.
Playing alone, harmony accumulates. A past self and a present self sound together. The framework of the act of performing changes.
He did not choose an effect. He designed a form of performance.
And importantly, this device has constraints. Tape length determines the delay time, and the way sound fades is determined by the characteristics of the machine. It cannot be made arbitrary.
The approach becomes: find out what is possible inside that constraint. He was not after freely constructible sound.
Taking the guitar sound out of the guitar sound
Entering the 1980s, Fripp begins using Roland guitar synthesizers in earnest. The GR-300, later the GR-700. This corresponds to the period of King Crimson's Warner albums — Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair.
Guitar synths were fairly awkward machines at the time. There was tracking lag, and they were fussy about how you played. He kept using them anyway.
Explaining this from the tone side probably falls short.
Using a guitar synth means severing the correspondence between the vibration of a string and the sound that comes out. There is no longer any physical necessity linking where you fret and the timbre that sounds.
For most guitarists this is a costly choice. Picking nuance stops being reflected in tone, and the information carried by the hand decreases.
But he does not play by pouring hand information into tone in the first place. His playing is built on precise note values, repeating patterns and meticulous placement of notes. It is playing that communicates through structure, not through tone.
If so, it does not matter what the sound source is. As long as the structure can be designed, what comes out need not be a guitar sound.
That he later used modelling machines such as the Roland VG-8 is explained the same way. Being able to call up several sound sources from one instrument suited the design of his playing.
Soundscapes — an updated mechanism
From the 1990s, Frippertronics is updated into the form called Soundscapes.
At the centre is digital processing such as an Eventide H3000, applying treatment including real-time pitch shifting and feeding it into delay-based repetition. It is easiest to think of it as the tape approach rebuilt digitally.
What is interesting is that although the apparatus was replaced, what he is doing has not changed.
Layer the playing on the spot. Use the layered state as material for the next playing. His own output becomes an environment, and he plays against that environment.
On tape or in digital, this structure is the same.
For him, updating gear is not updating a tone. It is only updating how the mechanism is implemented. The constraints of tape were replaced by the constraints of digital, and what was possible increased slightly. That is all.
Which is why his gear history leaves few traces of a "quest for tone." He used Hiwatt for a long time and a Les Paul for a long time — remarkably little movement in that department.
What moves is always the system side.
Even the tuning became an object of design
The attitude of designing a methodology appeared in its most extreme form in a domain that is not gear at all.
In the mid-1980s Fripp began a teaching framework called Guitar Craft. What was used there was a tuning entirely unlike standard. From the bottom: C, G, D, A, E, G. Built up in fifths, it is called New Standard Tuning.
Consider what that means.
Standard guitar tuning is a slightly irregular structure — fourths as the basis, with a single third inserted at one point. It is a product of historical circumstance, not something rationally designed.
But thanks to that, chord shapes land in practical forms. Several centuries of accumulation sits on top of this irregularity.
Unify it into fifths and all of that accumulation becomes unusable. Finger shapes and scale positions must be relearned. String tension changes too, so gauges have to be reconsidered.
Normally, you do not do this. Too much is lost.
Fripp did it.
The reason makes sense if you take it that he wanted to discard the existing vocabulary for a while. Playing in standard tuning, the hand drops of its own accord into shapes it has memorised. Where it lands is usually a phrase someone has already played.
Change the structure and hand habits stop working. Then observe what comes out in that state.
This is neither a choice of tone nor a choice of gear. It is the act of redesigning the preconditions of performance itself.
If Frippertronics designed the time structure of performance, New Standard Tuning designed its spatial structure.
Neither touches the texture of the resulting sound directly. What is touched is always the mechanism.
What it means to design a methodology
Lining up the three players, a type of playing philosophy comes into view.
Holdsworth designed the time of sound. He erased attack, made sustain even, and sought means of touching a sounding note after the fact.
Dimebag designed the conditions that protect attack. From input to output, he assembled a path in which the transient does not round off.
Fripp designed the framework of the act of playing. Before deciding what to play, he decided the rules for how played sound behaves.
None of the three chose gear as "something that sounds good." They chose it as parts that implement their requirements.
And none of the three accepted off-the-shelf products as they were. Holdsworth had Pearce modify things and built his own load box; Dimebag was involved in amplifier design; Fripp used tape recorders outside their intended purpose.
When the requirement comes first, the way gear gets used inevitably deviates.
People who have a mechanism do not get lost in gear
As a practical matter, this perspective has a use.
When you agonise endlessly over choosing gear, what is missing is usually not knowledge. More often, your own mechanism has not been decided.
By what procedure do you make a sound, what gets decided where, and what do you move while playing? Settle that and the necessary gear narrows considerably. Leave it unsettled and every piece of gear feels promising.
Fripp's gear history barely moves over long periods, I think, because the mechanism was fixed at an early stage. Once the mechanism is decided, gear can be judged solely on whether it satisfies the mechanism's requirements.
A tone can be searched for endlessly. A methodology ends once you decide it.
And the sound that comes out within the methodology you decided becomes, as a result, your sound.
It is worth checking, now and then, whether that order has been reversed.
Sources
- Frippertronics — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frippertronics
- Rig Rundown: King Crimson's Robert Fripp — Premier Guitar https://www.premierguitar.com/gear/rig-rundown-king-crimsons-robert-fripp
- On the Roland GR-300 and its users https://gr300.com/GR-300.htm
- Audio in the text: Fripp & Eno,
The Heavenly Music Corporation I(fromNo Pussyfooting, 1973), from the official Robert Fripp channel.