bum notes/ lumpy loops

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Mark Francombe was talking about bum notes
and it reminded me that in my live looping clinic at the recent
PASIC convention (7 thousand drummer/percussionists all in the same
convention hall/hotel  all talking about wing nuts at once............teee 
heee)
I demonstrated that one could make a lumpy loop (one that truncates a 
little 
to early or late)
and that if one learns the loop that it can become musical and plays 
appropriately with it.

I purposefully made a very , very late truncation of a beat box loop, 
enough 
so that famed drummer
Billy Ward who was sitting in the front row (as intimidating as possible) 
was in physical agony over
how 'bad' it sounded.  But I got the audience to learn the 'actual' rhythm 
of the loop and start to sing in unison with it.
Amazingly enough,  the whole room singing in unison with this obvious 
pause 
at the end of the loop
suddenly started sounding good and I started to sing a melody over the top 
of it.

Steve Lawson gets all credit for hipping me to this wonderful phenomenae 
(although I had learned in my early
loop trio gigs with my brother Bill and multi reed/multi instrumentalist 
Gary Regina that many a bad loop could be salvaged.     I think I"ve 
mentioned this before, but for those who didn't read it earlier,  Steve 
would lay down a really long loop with a lot of rubato parts in it and 
then 
play it over and over and over until he memorized the shape of the loop.

This is so incredibly effective for training ourselves to play with 
musicians with either idiosyncratic ways of feeling time or
musicians from culturals with radicall different metric maps than our 
typical metronomic western approach.

In a way,  if we learn what actually IS in a loops' timing,   we get 
deeper 
and deeper with our understanding
of where the ONE is.