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Re: Tactics for Circumventing Musical Ruts
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, loop.pool wrote:
[snip]
> I thought this was a really interesting approach to circumventing
>musical
> ruts and it got me to thinking about
> other potential ways that we can use to get ourselves out of our normal
> musical ruts (for composition;
> for improvisation; for looping, whatever).
>
> Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone would be interested in contributing
>to a
> thread on tactics or devices
> that we use to break ourselves out of our musical ruts.
Sure, here's a few things I do to broaden a rut:
Pick my favorite effect in my signal chain, declare it overused, and
remove it.
Pick my least-used effect in my signal chain, and focus on it.
Look outside (I have big windows in my music room). Play with the weather.
I head for the music room during a thunderstorm when it's passing nearby.
By paying attention to the timing between lightning flash and the thunder
reaching me I can treat it as a *really long* reverb from the storm and
synchronize to play with the thunder.
(Not interested in having a personal experience with lightning, I tend to
either stop when the strom gets directly overhead, or switch to something
acoustic, or to theremin being non-contact).
Work with someone new. For example, recently I've been working with a
very talented and experienced acoustic guitarist who plays blues and
bluegrass. This being pretty alien territory to me, I've had to work hard
to find anything in myself that I consider both interesting and
complementary to contribute in our jam sessions.
Grab one of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards and apply it.
I hope these are interesting and even useful ideas for others.
best,
Steve B
Phasmatodea http://www.phasmatodea.net/
Subscape Annex http://www.subscapeannex.com/