RE: HuMaNiZiNg cold DRUM MACHINES

["loop.pool" <rickwalker@looppool.info>]

I have to go on record, as a drum programming snob,to say  that Matt
Davignon's set
at Y2K3 turned me on as much as anything I"ve ever seen a person do with a
drum machine
in a live show.  (the last thing that really got me was  when Andre LaFosse
used an archaic Roland drummachine to stutter
trigger his multiple glitched guitar loops in his demo of the EDP at
Y2K2---I hear that Claude Voit also did a lot of work with
this or similar techniques but I'm never seen him do it live).

Just a beautiful and quirky and fascinating set, Matt.  You singlehandely
rekindled my interest in
the live use of drum machines with your set.

In general, to stay with this thread, I think the manipulation (especially
timbral manipulation when used in a rhtymic way) of drum machines
is fascinating in live work if done well.

Those electrix, tempo midi driven effects (the MoFX, the Filter Factory and
Filter Queen and the Warp Factory vocoder
are just phenomenal for that: especially when they are 'played' like a 
drum.
I've actually not seen anyone use those machines
in a real rhythmical way yet, but the buttons were literally designed to
withstand the pressure of some one drumming with them
using their fingers.      The large central buttons either momentarily take
the effect off or momentarily put the effect on whichever way
you have it set up to do.       I love putting a telephone frequency on a
drum track suddenly (making it tiny and nasal and far away sounding
and then rhythmically triggering it in the rhtythm of either the kick drum
or the snare drum........this is a really dramatic break down technique)

Similarly, the Kaoss pad, the Dr. Sample,  the Air Effects and all of those
cool D-Beams that the Roland products have
for tweaking drum sounds  really make for interesting (albeit synthetic)
real time effects.

A cool thing to do is to just change the resonance and cutoff on just hi
hats or even, if you can frequency separate your tracks,
the hi frequecies of guitar, synth and bass patches to create a percolating
mix.   That's when it's nice to have some separate outs
and something like the patch bay that John Wagner uses in his set.

Timothy Crowe should also be singled out for some cool drum effect
processing he did at the percussion festival.

My only regret is that Matt wasn't part of the 1st Percussion Live Looping
portion of the festival.

would you consider joining we percussionists at the next one, Matt?

yours,   Rick