Re: real time groove loops

[Kim Flint <kflint@annihilist.com>]

At 1:15 PM -0800 2/7/98, Andre LaFosse wrote:
>Kim Flint wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>Didn't you study with Alfred Ladzekpo?  He and his brother Kobla have
>been running the African program at my alma mater CalArts for many years
>now.  Small world (or at least a small circle of left-leaning West Coast
>colleges).  Anyway...

It was actually C.K. Ladzekpo, who teaches at UC Berkeley. There's a whole
big family of Ladzekpos around that do west african drumming performances
and classes and such. "Studied with" is not exactly the right term in my
case. More like "be totally humbled by." I learned a lot from that
experience and that class, even if I never got past sucking at it.


>> 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....
>
>What if you took a program like Steinberg's Recycle! to chop up the
>different sections of a drum break, but then assigned each different
>section to a series of electronic drum pads that could trigger them?
>You'd basically have a number of groove sub-sections (maybe no longer
>than two or three eight-notes each) that could be played in a live,
>spontaneous manner.  If the fragments are short enough, and the tempo
>fast enough, you could be doing enough to really be "playing" the
>rhythms yourself, even as the sampled bits fill in ultra-precise details
>of the groove.

yeah, that's one idea I'm thinking about. Like it would be absurd to think
you could play a dnb type snare roll. But it wouldn't be so absurd to think
of it as a single thing, which you trigger and deal with the dynamics and
length of it.

And speaking of real-time Recycle, the new roland sp808 has that feature,
or something real close. You can sample a whole breakbeat, have it chop it
up and automatically assign each piece to a pad. Pretty cool!  It also has
the time expansion/contraction features that let you match tempos without
affecting the pitch.


>I also recall seeing an MTV news story many years ago about a guy (don't
>recall his name) who has designed a suit that had percussion pads all
>over it.  So he produced rhythms by striking these different pads all
>over his body. including kick drum samples in his boot heel which he
>triggered by stomping the ground with his foot.  Kind of a strange
>visual spectacle...  It would definitely be more physically involved.
>Just don't get that snare pad on your knee confused with your nose...

sort of like "futureman" Wooten of bela fleck fame? or zendrum. Zendrum
looks pretty cool, actually. I could relate to that since I'm always
tapping out rhythms with my fingers. All that guitar technique wouldn't go
to waste either....


>So in dealing with the issue of, "How do you make an inherently
>pieced-together work of art happen spontaneously and improvisationally,"
>you've really got to think about what kinds of trade-offs you want to
>make.  How do you paint a painting spontaneously?  How to you compose an
>orchestral arrangement spontaneously?  How do you record an album
>spontaneously?  There are ways to do all of these things, but they don't
>lead you to the same places that you can go if you do things in a more
>setup-time method.
>
>I read an interview with Rupert Parkes not long ago, where he said that
>the piecing-together process is one of the most fundamental aspects of
>what he does, and that live performance has no interest for him, and no
>relavence to what he does.  Then again, I heard talk on Usenet of an
>upcoming Photek performance in Canada (?!?!), so maybe he changed his
>mind...

I'm not really so interested in "live performance" as more of a live
approach. And I guess that to me really means a tool, or "instrument" that
allows the easy and free flow of ideas, and encourages the musicality of
it. It needs to be elegant, and intuitive, and musical. There's no reason
why it doesn't have to allow this piecing together practice, that's part of
the music, it should be part of the instruments that create it. What I find
in the tools used now (for dnb, anyway) is clumsy and tedious, not well
suited to the purpose, and not very musical to me.

And naturally, I think real-time looping is a big part of the answer!

kim

______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
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