Caravan with a Bass Solo

[jancivil]

bound to happen at some time


revisionism rules ok - now known as Later That Night

in extending this mystery groove, I had put the time together and was making up the new section, which is another treatment of the 3-note harp vamp, and, well it was in 9 ostensibly, and this bass solo happened which is kind of bizarre. a little like Paddy O'Hearn with Zappa.

it's about to go back into the actual development of the harp lick, which this elides for a time, for no reason other than the Line insisted.

I felt the first vamp had run its course/wrap it up, and I made a double cadence which is REALLY stupid: first the half cadence in a faux-baroque deal (which is essentially a very cornball blues cadence, if you think about it) and the complete w. 'picardy third' in rock clothing.

then a mystery harpeggio then this bass

which I think monstrous in that I was playing over nothing but the time, and the line seems to stand on its own.

when that bandwidth is beat

cara van sera I

[rachmiel]

very cool. and the bass solo at the end is fabulous ... very zappa.

www.inselmuse.com/caravan(aggio).mp3

:-)

[jancivil]

[Elvis}thankyu very much[/Elvis]

These licks crashed my machine like six times while executing it. Fortunately I have cubase set to auto-save every nine minutes, and lost nothing that didn't get better with the next take.

I just went to see what the actual 'time signature' would be in that section and it goes:

9+10+11+12+13+14 = 69. For real, these would = the most reasonable downbeats.


You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, vol. 6/disc two, has a sequence where L[akshminarayana, or 'Larry'] Shankar and FZ do a [quasi-Hindustani] thing called "Thirteen" which goes into [a funk jam] "Lobster Girl" by O'Hearn and Vinnie Coliauta, and this apparently took over part of my brain.

I would like to see this solo notated, it would be a pretty black page. (My ambition is to be the whole Zappa band at a given time, which is of course ridiculous. )


what's supposed to be at the end of your link (404 error here)? something called 'caravan(aggio)' would be a heckuv coincidence -

[runagate]

I got to see a jazz band play Zappa tunes at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis when they "opened" for a documentary about Captain Beefheart. I liked it better played by them, oddly. It was lead by a more rock-oriented guitar player, but the horn section and such were mostly old jazzbos. You two would have loved that show.

This gives me hope that, despite what one would initially assume, electronic music will habituate people to uneven meters and the like and free music from the absurd constraints that endlessly repetetive conditioning from plutocrat-controlled media has subjected the world to. All that's got to happen is for it to be floating around out there in the noosphere and it'll do it's mischief.

[jancivil]

I got to see a jazz band play Zappa tunes at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis when they "opened" for a documentary about Captain Beefheart. I liked it better played by them, oddly. It was lead by a more rock-oriented guitar player, but the horn section and such were mostly old jazzbos. You two would have loved that show.

This gives me hope that, despite what one would initially assume, electronic music will habituate people to uneven meters and the like and free music from the absurd constraints that endlessly repetetive conditioning from plutocrat-controlled media has subjected the world to. All that's got to happen is for it to be floating around out there in the noosphere and it'll do it's mischief.

that's why I will occasionally rant whenever someone asserts that they're more comfy w. four/four simply cuz it's more natural.

it is more comfy when you're entrained so well to it, but there's nothing in nature that indicates it, it's merely a preference. (this here was not only natural but UNAVOIDABLE to me, against a reggae backbeat. I was going to do something 'regular', and this got regulated differently than t'other regular.)

we don't speak in even meters, why should we need to communicate musically in them all the time?


any way, in terms of the crass self-promo, this points to my more time-oriented thing, which hasn't quite been presented here yet.

so watch out.

[rachmiel]

9+10+11+12+13+14 = 69.

integer-al serialism? ;-)

(My ambition is to be the whole Zappa band at a given time,

so do you PLAY these parts? as opposed to using computers to play them.

what's supposed to be at the end of your link (404 error here)? something called 'caravan(aggio)' would be a heckuv coincidence -

yes, it is a coincidence. i changed the name; this should work:

www.inselmuse.com/caravan_aggio.mp3

:-)

[rachmiel]

This gives me hope that, despite what one would initially assume, electronic music will habituate people to uneven meters and the like and free music from the absurd constraints that endlessly repetetive conditioning from plutocrat-controlled media has subjected the world to.

from what i've heard, and i've heard quite a lot, 4/4 is utterly dominant in electronic music. certainly anything near dance music. even electronica and idm is heavily 4/4. it's like the well tempered chromatic scale. there's no reason beyond conditioning that it should dominate the harmonic world of electronica.

[rachmiel]

we don't speak in even meters, why should we need to communicate musically in them all the time?

are we doppelgaenger?

http://rachmiel.org/words/soundings/groove-fascism.htm

[runagate]

This gives me hope that, despite what one would initially assume, electronic music will habituate people to uneven meters and the like and free music from the absurd constraints that endlessly repetetive conditioning from plutocrat-controlled media has subjected the world to.

from what i've heard, and i've heard quite a lot, 4/4 is utterly dominant in electronic music. certainly anything near dance music. even electronica and idm is heavily 4/4. it's like the well tempered chromatic scale. there's no reason beyond conditioning that it should dominate the harmonic world of electronica.

Certainly. I guess I left out the part that electronic music removes the bar of having to teach a big pile of other people how to play in weird times.

I guess in the academic or classical music world the people will occasionally teach themselves to play your weird scores (if you can afford it, or if like your Brian it's so attractively crazy to even try) but I live in freaking minnesota and despite having hard-to-believe-talented partners in the past I personally cannot play the instruments they play so writing to them is difficult, and given my uirky way of playing the standard instruments laying around (don't even ask - I was left alone with various instruments without guidance too often and assumed that any musician would love extended technique hehe)

Um, I'm sick and therefore rambling.

Essentially, FL allows me to score in whatever the hell time I want.
It's absolutely amazing. It's not as easy as me playing it on something I can play like a recorder or a jawharp or a bass clarinet but itcertainly allows me to sketch things out on, say, a drum to show a drummer that I'd not even remotely be able to play all the way through.

And therefore.... uneven meters, weird tunings, polyrythms, absurd fusions of genres and the like are disseminating easier.

I don't think that people have to hear such things all the time to be effected, and I find it promising that it's likely at all that they'll encounter them. It's certainly a long-term change, but a promising one.

[justin3am]

The whole concept of 4/4, 5/4, 3/4 whatever/4 is kinda weird to me. It's like saying that you have a grid that can be infinetly divided, multiplied and resized but you must always stick to the same ratio of divisions. When I look at the graph of a piano roll (no matter what meter or tempo) I see the potential for equal division, linear slopes, exponential and logrithmic curves.

Depending on the resolutionof the graph all manners of mathematial fomulae can be applied to the variation in movement of repetitions (or lack there of ). I usually use 4/4 because the intervals of the grid make it conducive to creating more complex iterations of the same base (or mulitples/reciprocals of that base). I guess in that respect I don't think in terms of a constant meter as opposed to a constanly flexing time base. The same goes for tempo, I always program at 64, 96, 128, 144 and 192 because they are all easily multiplied or divided by 2, 3 or 4 to create relationships with each other allow the different meter changes I use to feel natural (to me).

Anyway, my boss and I were grooving to this at work earlier today, I just forgot to comment. Excellent work once again.

[runagate]

I see the potential for equal division, linear slopes, exponential and logrithmic curves.

Weirdly that's how I think outside the DAW and have trouble with it inside. I am no beatmaker. That's why I've been practicing inputing everything live now that I have midi instruments.

[jancivil]

9+10+11+12+13+14 = 69.

integer-al serialism?

(My ambition is to be the whole Zappa band at a given time,

so do you PLAY these parts? as opposed to using computers to play them.

what's supposed to be at the end of your link (404 error here)? something called 'caravan(aggio)' would be a heckuv coincidence -

yes, it is a coincidence. i changed the name; this should work:

www.inselmuse.com/caravan_aggio.mp3

what my MO is, I throw some licks onto the time line bits at a time, due to the ridiculous latency of this age old machine, and drag 'em to where they actually go, in time. lotta 'em I nail, even so; it's an insane procedure, which I have gotten down almost to a science.

So, I 'play' them, with total cheating to make me look good. That said, this bass solo was pretty close to a live event, I had only kontakt loaded, I could nail a solo almost. This is out of the box 'fretless bass instrument' (not any fancy pants sample library with options for nuances or attacks, or anything), included with kontakt 2. hammered out on a 49key M audio dealy.

this mystery groove, I call it that because I didn't adjust that timeline til after the fact:
the original i extracted the vamp from is one bar of '15/4 at 30 bpm', which is strictly a time reference, to give me a half a minute as a limitation. I left that signature and tempo alone and got directly to work. SO! the grid tells you something which has NOTHING to do with the beat/bar values. After a while, I did set time sigs so that ONE was near a bar line, but it says like 7/16 @ 30, when it's a slow 4 at, I donno, you do the math. NB: this totally freed me from a restrictive sense of beat/grid.

the mystery groove. I really prefer an organic flow.

the percussion I mostly do from a drum controller, which gives me some mystery MIDI controllers which definitely add oomph to the velocity and feel, tho I can't pretend to know anything about it. If you want a snare drum to POP, you gotta hit it, this I'm convinced of.

I don't believe I'd be getting this kind of live feel without having kinda sorta played something, I mean I have skills on a DAW, but that's ridiculous, to 'sequence' to that extent.

those time sigs, only after the fact did I find they fall that way; the continued transition, which sets up the return exactly right, actually continues to 15/4, which is bizarre, but it appears to work out.

I rarely think in terms of quantified numbers at all; sometimes it's obvious 4/4; the sea chantey I originally had a Tala in mind, 4 + 6 + 4 + 4, but that varied eventually, and as per usual I went back and found out what the best look was in a time signature.

the new section of this, the return to what the bass solo subverts, the first phrase IS in 9+10+9+11, which is like a TALA in Indian classical music. I sat for a while and felt it, counted 4+5, 4+6; 4+5, 4+4+3.
I have done some time looking at Indian musics, I had a Mridngam for a short time.

NEW version (has more developed percussion and a setup to return to the 3note vamp it begins with)
mirage-etc

[jancivil]

we don't speak in even meters, why should we need to communicate musically in them all the time?

are we doppelgaenger?

http://rachmiel.org/words/soundings/groove-fascism.htm

what some people like to call a groove I think they've confused with a rut

[jancivil]

This gives me hope that, despite what one would initially assume, electronic music will habituate people to uneven meters and the like and free music from the absurd constraints that endlessly repetetive conditioning from plutocrat-controlled media has subjected the world to.

from what i've heard, and i've heard quite a lot, 4/4 is utterly dominant in electronic music. certainly anything near dance music. even electronica and idm is heavily 4/4. it's like the well tempered chromatic scale. there's no reason beyond conditioning that it should dominate the harmonic world of electronica.

here's an arcane point, which I learned very recently: the WELL-tempered tuning isn't the same as the equal tempered one, it's less compromised, which means that the colors of JS Bach's 24 whatchamacallits stand out more, and have dissonances peculiar to each. IE: sits somewhere betwixt mean and equal systems.

I don't like et, you see me using 'fretless bass' and pitch bend on these horns, and a lot of percussion.

it's inferior, et. it's why we have so many notes in the west, to make up for its lack

the ultimate use of it is 12-tone, obviously, which, well... it shows we're not comfortable with sticking with a tone.. it doesn't gibe with natural resonance.


I disagree with you runagate, I think that computers will change absolutely nothing, except possibly amplify the problem.

to look into a thing means curiosity, and I don't think computers, are by-and-large, for the average consumer, really good for that, everything is at your disposal, done for you already -

and what you're gonna get in 'electronic music' is just more of this dreadful so-called dance beat and BEATS per MINUTE very literally. tick tock tick tock.

hup two three four
you like the beat that supports tha war


[sure, it frees me up to pretend to be an O'Hearn or a Colauita (as opposed to seeking people out to do that), but I'm from a VERY old school.]

[runagate]

Fair enough.

By the by I've actually listened to this song now and really like it.

As to temperament: with PCs it's possible to use whatever temperament you want on a per-chord basis. Pure ratios for a 5th, equal temperament for a m7, etc. Cake and eat it to. A nightmare to deal with in Midi (takes some odd use of Fractal Tunesmithy or Scale, MidiOx and multiple instances of the same VSTi, each receiving the appropriate temperament). It sounds really wonderful that way but as I stopped making quasi-orchestral things about 4 years ago I've not had the time to make any. Come to think of it I stopped making microtonal songs not long after coming to KVR.

The ludicrous thing is that your music is a lot closer to what I'd always imagined using a PC to make than anything else I can think of. Didn't turn out that way, but then I never imagined the sound design possibilities of synthesis, either.

Back to computer-aided music creation:
I suppose my point of view is hopelessly skewed by the fact that I am the most divorced from involuntary exposure to pop culture of anyone here, so I can only half-imagine what it is ya'll hear on the radio or the net or wherever.