Re: real time groove loops

[Kim Flint <kflint@chromatic.com>]

At 08:01 PM 2/6/98 -0800, Andre LaFosse wrote:

>Kim said:
>> A lot of electronic music has exciting, complex, danceable grooves, and
>> creating it by carefully entering things into a sequencer program on a
>> computer just feels totally wrong. 
>
>Funny, for me it makes perfect sense.  I never use a sequencer program
>on a computer to buukd grooves, though.  I use an old Roland TR-626,
>which has a built-in step time programmer, which I use to trigger
>percussion (or non-percussion) samples.  You can loop a bar over and
>over, and add one drum sound at a time on a visual grid, so you hear the
>pattern building as you go.  I create patterns on this and then transfer
>them onto the computer.  It's the only way I could see doing it; there's
>no way I could come up with decent patterns entering them one-by-one in
>step time on a screen, or manually via keys on a keyboard.

I guess it "feels totally wrong" because I've been dealing with live
percussion in so many different forms for so long, and I always approach it
that way. (I realized a long time ago that I'm a frustrated drummer playing
the wrong instrument, I was always air-drumming instead of 
air-guitaring...)
I usually have the beat I want in my head and can usually play it, in a 
very
immediate, "just feel it" sort of way. Programming it from there is usually
very tedious. The worst part is getting that "feel" right because I have to
figure out, in a very analytical way, the very human aspects of rhythm. 
Like
leading or lagging the beat, degrees of swing, dynamics in accents, etc.
Getting it right takes forever and is very frustrating for someone with an
attention span as short as mine. And certainly, the "liveness" is gone.

A good instrument, in an abstracted sense of it, would allow those ideas to
flow without interference. (With some practice and dedication of course, as
any good instrument should require.) It would also allow me to intuitively
create the music I like, without requiring that I sit in front of computers
like I do all the other times in my life. 


>> You should be able to jump around and be
>> physically active and involved in creating it, in real time. 
>
>I've actually seen quite a bit of footage of live techno shows where the
>guys are hopping up and down on stage -- which is pretty funny, because
>the only performance thing they're doing is hitting the "next pattern"
>button on their sequencer.  Not quite the same thing, though.

yeah, that's not what I mean. Nothing to do with the visual aspects on
stage. Good, groovy rhythms come from your body, not your head. That's the
most important thing I learned from my attempt to learn west african
drumming. The rhythm has to be in your body or you never get it. I find 
that
being physically involved in a rhythm has much better results than just
thinking about it. And clicking a mouse just isn't that physical....




>> With something
>> like drum and bass, which really lends itself to a jazz perspective of
>> improvisation and rhythmic complexity, this seems to become even more > 
>true.
>
>I just don't think it's possible, in my opinion.  A big part of the
>sound of jungle to my ears is the fact that you're getting very choppy,
>angular breaks in the sound, which stem from the ambience of the source
>sound being cut up into different subsections, or from the distinct sort
>of precision that comes from electronically triggering sampled sounds at
>high speeds.  Those sorts of phenomena just don't exist in nature.  

oh sure. I'm not talking about instruments in any traditional sense, or
trying to have live drummers in drum and bass. That might be sort of
interesting, but mostly misses the point, as you noted. It's contrained by
nature and tradition, whereas drum and bass is not. 

I'm wondering what an actual *instrument* might be that could allow a music
like drum and bass to be created in the sort of musically intuitive, live,
improvisational fashion that I love, and allow for all those 
characteristics
that I like in drum and bass. Most likely, it wouldn't much resemble any
traditional sort of instrument, although it might likely have elements of
those. (old ideas are often good ideas....)

Not possible? I don't think I know that phrase.....there's "difficult" and
"time consuming" and "expensive" but nothing's impossible.....


>music.  I think this is one of the reasons there's so much hubbub over
>d&b: It represents a new level of intricacy and complexity being brought
>to what is often a characteristically rigid genre, and it's happening on
>the technology's own terms, to come up with things that someone behind
>an acoustic drum kit can't really play.

absolutely. One thing I like about drum and bass is that it has abstracted
percussion quite a bit, and deals with it in and of itself. Constraints
imposed by centuries of tradition are just absent, as are constraints of
human capability. It's just percussion. An instrument that fits with that
would also have to free itself from traditions, and allow for entirely new
approaches. 



>> Still, the tools just ain't happening yet, at least in the 
>> "instrument"
>> sense. room for innovation.....
>
>It would be great to see something like that come to pass, but I just
>don't see how it's fundamentally possible, 

Not being able to see how it's possible is the thing that separates us
normal folks from the geniuses! It's the Matthias' and Don Buchla's and
Einstein's who are able to envision these things and bring them to us,
usually long before we are able to accept them. I have the foolish faith in
human ingenuity that's telling me that somewhere, sometime, someone will
find the answer. The sooner the better, actually....


>multitracked vocal parts.  It's the age-old live-vs.-studio debate.  So
>much modern dance music is an inherently studio-based thing, and I do
>think there's a limit as to how much of that side of things can
>realistically be transferred into the spontaneous, live realm.  

Maybe the trick is to consider the studio an instrument, rather than an
assortment of tools connected together. Design it according to some
conceptions and rules of "instrument" and maybe you are on the right 
track....

I've heard remix artists talk about their studios this way.

>For me,
>that's one of the interesting dualities of the music: that something so
>energetic and lively can be produced by a method so deliberate and
>painstaking.

For me, that's just a problem begging for a solution.....I guess that's why
I wound up being an engineer.

kim
________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                      408-752-9284
Mpact System Engineering       kflint@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research             http://www.chromatic.com