MPA Radio - 092 - Frippertronics

In this weeks episode we lose ourselves in the world of Frippertronics for an hour.

Frippertronics is Robert Fripp’s name for a long-delay, tape-loop performance system he popularised in the 1970s, first explored with Brian Eno and rooted in Terry Riley’s earlier “time-lag accumulator” setup. Riley’s twin-deck method (two reel-to-reels passing a single loop of tape between them) laid the groundwork; Fripp and Eno adapted it on No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975). By the late ’70s Fripp had coined the term “Frippertronics” for his solo concerts and records (Exposure, Let the Power Fall), turning the rig into both a compositional tool and a live act.

How it’s done: two tape machines, one set to record, the other to play back. The tape physically travels from the record deck to the playback deck; the distance between them (and the tape speed) sets the delay time—anything from a few seconds to close to a minute if you run the tape around mic stands. You then feed some of the playback signal back into the record input. That feedback amount is the musical heart of it: set low, older material fades gracefully; set higher, the loop saturates and becomes dense. You perform into this memory—guitar lines, harmonics, swells—and the system keeps handing your past back to you in the present.

Control lives in a few simple moves: input level (how much of the new phrase prints), feedback (how long the past persists), EQ (to stop low-end fog or tame brightness), and occasionally tape speed for pitch/time shifts. The art is in pacing—leaving space so the loop breathes, nudging the texture rather than flooding it. Classic Frippertronics is clean electric guitar plus volume pedal into the decks; the room becomes part of the instrument, especially in large spaces.

Modern equivalents recreate the same logic with pedals or DAWs: one long buffer for the “tape,” a regeneration/feedback control for memory, sometimes reverse and speed for extra colour. Artists from Fripp and Eno to Riley’s descendants, David Torn, Michael Brook, Fennesz and others have each taken the idea somewhere personal. But the core remains beautifully direct: a system that remembers, a player in conversation with that memory, and music that evolves rather than repeats. Enjoy!

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MPA RADIO - 092  FRIPPERTRONICS

The Music Production Academy (The MPA), is a London-based online Music Production School, that aims to teach and provide innovative, useful production techniques for people working with music and sound. Our process and techniques have been finely tuned over three decades of lived studio experience. 

Learn directly through knowledge gained from Producing, Mixing, Engineering, and Mastering sessions for artists such as, Björk, Massive Attack, Depeche Mode and U2 to name a few. We aim to show you the process you haven’t lived yet, sharing with you what it is like to be in the studio with some of the most talented bands and artists in the world.

Along the way explaining what it is like to be in the room for those moments in musical history, teaching you the techniques used to make those records.

The MPA endeavour to foster creativity through engaging and playful experiences. We combine past influences with modern concepts and possibilities, to allow a place for new ways of working and thinking while allowing original ideas to flourish.