How can you play in the correct speed if you don't hear the drums first?

["Rick Walker (Loop.pooL)" <GLOBAL@cruzio.com>]

Matthias wrote:
I never thought of this option. How can you play in the correct speed
if you don't hear the drum first?


For what it's worth Matthias, in a new wave band I led in the early
eighties, Tao Chemical, we wanted to be able to start songs without count
ins for maximum theatricality.   We practised
starting the song without the guitarist and the bassist knowing what the
tempo was (well, we knew what the relative tempo approach is)....just a
visual cue from me about where the downbeat occurred.

A great trick we developed to teach ourselves how to do this:    Make sure
that what ever you are going to loop (your melodic part, that is) has a
value of at least one eight note (if your meter is in 16th notes) but
preferabbly a dotted eighth note or a quarter note.   Since you are
controlling the "on" event, you hit the downbeat melodic or harmonic figure
as you hit 'play' on the drum machine and listen like hell!!!   What 
happens
is that you will hear at least the down beat and the next 'hihat' or
hihat-esque sound if not 3 or 4 of these metric units before you have to
play your next chord or melody note.  You then teach yourself how to get
tempi from only two or three events.
This is very jarring at first, but, believe it or not after you have done 
it
10 or 20 times at a few different tempi you get the hang of it and, most
importantly, you quit being anxious about coming in with your next event
(the anxiety that almost invariably causes human beings to  play ahead of
the beat).   This is very effective in performance.  It comes across as 
very
organic even when one is playing to a sequenced track or a drum machine.

Another good thing to do is to learn how to play behind the beat or ahead 
of
the beat with total impunity.  This is a longer discussion and if you or
anyone else wants to hear it, I'll be happy to
post a very cool trick I invented for teaching a rank beginner how to do
this against a metronomic track.   Just let me know.   Right now,  I'm 
about
to clean install my whole friggin' system to prepare for a big
production/writing gig that starts next week.   My system has been
increasingly buggy and I can't afford for it to fuck up on me next week.  I
may be off line for a day or two, consequently.    Wish me luck,    Rick
Walker  (loop.pool)