Re: CONSTRAINED RANDOM SCALES for COMPOSITION

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Per wrote:
"Obviously this happened to me because he played so fast that it was 
physically impossible to hear
each note - so I was sort of forced into listening to the flow of the
notes instead. A great revelation it was! :-) Some years later I read
about John Coltrane having this experience when hearing the harp being
played and smiled to myself as I was reading... It's really a
universal phenomenon."

Exactly!    That's what I call the 'smear effect'  to all of my drum and 
percussion students.
If you play a buzz roll fast enough (even with one hand) you cannot here 
the individual notes
and yet you can use that 'smear' as if it was one note.

This is the total secret to playing brushes effectively and I'm blown 
away that no books on the subject
ever mention this.    I have a ten minute exercise that teaches people 
how to go from making
sharp transient sounds with the mouth (like a super rapid tonque flip to 
make a D or T sound without the phoneme
attached to the end of the said letter) where you sing the swing rhtyhm, 
then you make the envelope get slightly longer
adding a little bit of the AHH sound to it as you keep singing it in 
time, Finally you start to substitute the D sound for a G sound and then 
a soft G sound
and finally a Vowel beginning to the word   AHHHHHHHH.

This effectively makes the sounds envelope longer and longer with less 
and less attack (analagous to going from sticks to mallets to brushes)
while keeping your sounds the same.   It's amazing,   I avoided brushes 
for years because I could never figure out where , in the middle of
SHHHHHHHHHH the actual quarter note was.  This way teaches it quickly as 
you make the envelope exist equally on both sides of the intended note.

************
Also,  along these lines,    Bill, wonderful fretless electric bassist, 
Daniel Lewis and I were discussing how rapidly but shallow glissed vibratos
on a fretless instrument allowed one to imagine the intended melodic 
goal of the instrument.
Daniel told me that Mick Karn adopted this rapid vibrato technique 
because he was insecure about hitting the pitches accurately.
I laughed out loud at that wonderful notion as I love Mick Karn's 
rubbery approach.   It's so funny to me that it evolved out of extreme
insecurity.     Sounds like many techniques I evolved nervously in my 
drumming life...............lol