Re: Tactics for Circumventing Musical Ruts

[burnett@pobox.com]

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/