Rhythm Intensive and Rhythmic Programming

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

I was responding to the thread on realistic drum programming and
forgot to mention something that might be of interest to people here.

 I teach a course (through Skype) called the 'Rhythm Intensive' that is 4-8 hours
of private instruction on how to understand the universal principles of
global rhythm so that one can program drums realistically, arrange songs, compose or improvise
in real time with any style of music (regardless of whether you've heard it before) based ONLY
on rhythmic principles.  It is designed specifically to aid people in how to program, rhythmically.

I started teaching this course 25 years ago because I realized there was a
serious gap in Rhythmic Instruction in both books (in English) and in educational institutions.
Since I was blessed to be able to play, tour and record with some incredible master musicians from many different cultures,  I got to test out my theories about rhythm and began working on this system that I"ve now taught to literally thousands of people.  

The genesis of this program came,years ago,when I was playing a lot of rhythms on drumset that I had arranged from acoustic hand and finger drumming experiences with ethnic drumming traditions,

I became frustrated by the fact that a lot of really good bass players (pros with great technique
and lots of musical knowledge) just couldn't seem to find the groove with these new rhythms
despite how accomplished they were in other styles.

This fascinated me and I began a really intense analysis of every single rhythm I could get my hands on
from other cultures to see if I could ascertain an approach that might work for creating bass lines
to drum beats that would feel stylistically appropriate.

The more rhythms I analyzed (and I'm now in the research of the fourth volume of my
Global Beats and World Pop Styles encyclopedia,  having only published volume one in hand
written form) the more I began to see really simple emergent qualities of the ways that guitars, basses, drums, percussion and keyboards worked if they were in the 'rhythm section'

I started teaching what I called the Bass Rhythm Intensive.
After teaching about 50 bassists this approach, they kept coming up to me and saying,  'if only my guitarist or drummer understood this approach it would be so great for our band."    So I widened it
and started teaching other instrumentalists.     By now all these years later,  I've taught it
to Bassists, Guitarists, Keyboardists, Bowed String Players, Horn players, Producers, Arrangers,
Choreographers, Dancers and Vocalists).

It's just a map of how to do things and we all know that 'the map is not the territory' but as my intellecuaal mentor, Gregory Bateson once said, "there is, however, such a thing as a better map."

From the feedback I've gotten back from professional and non-professional musicians is
that it's a pretty strong approach that always yields musical results.

If anyone is interested, contact me off list and I can tell you more about it.