Re: OT: Drum machines vs. Human beings

["max valentino" <ekstasis1@hotmail.com>]

Hi All...I have been away for a few days, and now have had the tenuous joy 
of going thru this rather intensive thread on drum machines vs. humanity 
and 
some rather clever tricks to "personalise" drum machine loops.
I have had a good deal of experience with the public "distrust" of 
mechanized rhythms.  When I began doing looping shows I was quite into the 
one man band aspect of things; I had set up a hefty pedalboard (at one 
time 
17 pedals!) and rack mount processing in front of the looper, and tended 
to 
process each OD'd pass to the extreme.  To add to this, I would midi-sync 
a 
drum machine, mostly so that while using a JamMan I could move to seperate 
loops whilst staying in sync.  The drum Machine, would sometimes have 
multiple pattern which would be footswitched for different feels or "song" 
sections.
All in all I was fairly pleased with stuff I had worked out in the privacy 
of my own home....but, once I strated playing out I realized there might 
be 
a problem "communicating" using this sort of technology.  For solo bass 
stuff (sans drum machines), no matter how heavily processed, looped or 
"outside" the music was, the audience was mostly rapt with attention.  The 
whole concept of real-time loops was generally accepted, with a certain 
level of mystery, with amazement.  Yet, the minute the drum machines came 
on 
70% of the audience was lost.  Many would just get up and leave. Such was 
the general reaction to "sequenced parts" and "canned" drum machine sounds.
Well, I explained this dilemma to the most knowledable Rick Walker, who 
suggested I stop using programmed drum sequences, and instead actually 
play 
the drum machine; bulding the drum loop from scratch for the audience to 
witness.  Hey, this worked, sort of.  It seems most audience NEED the 
entertainment factor of watching a musician do his/her thing....and 
programming a drum machine in real timne did fill that void.  Of course, 
to 
some watching someone hunker over a tiny SR16 is not too terribly 
entertaining...something like a Kat or Octapad would very useful in that 
sort of setup.
The other problem was the sounds which most drum machines have. This 
dilemma 
had been addressed on this thread (flanger, phasing,EQ etc) but one thing 
I 
found was to use two drum machines.  One programmed with the "beats" and 
one 
with several "common feels" which could just percussive voices, or detuned 
drum sounds which could be triggered, mixed, and sync'd via midi.  This 
proved to give a very 3 dimensional sound to the sometimes static drum 
machine loops.  If you run to a mixer, try running the drums in stereo and 
inverting the phase on one side...this works some subtle magic also.
Yet..to wrap this up, I have since given up the drum machines, and now 
(for 
the past year of so) have been exploring playing percussive parts on my 
bass 
(a semi-acoustic Godin) via string mutes, dampening, rapping sections of 
the 
body or neck...and of course the infamous aligator clips. I am able to 
very 
deep, rich and polyrhythmical parts...even  killing off one sewction and 
rebuilding.  Now, hearing about LoopIV makes this technique and an EDP so 
promising!!!(the influence of Mr. LaFosse!!)
If I need "drum sounds" I use Fruity Loops and burn  parts to a CD and 
then 
loop a section of that to initiate a real-time looping performance 
(usually 
I prefer using the bass, tho).
One last thing.....I have also recently switched my processing around now 
favoring putting fx (which is now pretty much down to an M-One and 
parametric eq) AFTER my looper; insuch processing the loops instead of 
looping the fx.  Using timed delays, and detuned delays, this creates some 
very interesting polyrhytms whic can be "undone" by simply switching back 
to 
the original fx program (or to an different one).  Just curious about how 
many of you are setting up fx and loop mangling....
sorry about the length....
Max



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