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Looper's Delight
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Interesting conversation! Something bizarre happened to me when I started looping in the free improv context. Before that, I had played mostly in 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8 time because of my jazz background (I love 6/8 by the way....Footprints, is a good example), and in the early 90's when I was playing in a power trio I was doing very technical progressive rock originals in 7/8, 11/8, etc. However, when I started improv looping, one night I realized that I had stopped thinking about time signature, entirely. I merely sat down, started playing and whatever happened, happened....in the case where I was looping repeatable rhythms, I had no idea was time signature I was playing in, and I didn't really care...it was un-important. Then a percussionist started playing with me and he suggested how hard it was to play to my rhythmic loops, and I gathered this some nights when I'd look over at him, and he would be counting under his breath or had a puzzled look on his face. It turned out that I was looping in very odd time signatures, such as 13/8, 11/8, 9/8, or what he humorously suggested one time, 11 1/2 / 8, which would be 23/8. I had no idea I was doing this, but I was able to loop this way and improvise and solo over my material with no problem. But it was killing Vinnie! On the flip side, if you played a 13/8 progression to me and told me to improvise over it, it would somehow seem harder, because then I would be conscious of the odd time signature and would be trying to mold to it...yet when I unconsciously loop my own odd time signatures, all difficulties disappear....I don't mold to the rhythm, but become a part of it. It is almost as if I obtain this holistic perception of the odd time signature...feeling it as a whole rather than trying to analyze it's pieces. Kris ----- Original Message ----- From: <johnsrude@peak.org> To: <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com> Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 3:03 PM Subject: Re: Maybe why Avante-garde looping in US... >> By the way, if soloing over 7/8 seems daunting write me off list and >> I'll >> show you some really simple exercises >> to get free in that rhythmic space........................you'll see >that >> it >> is actually no more complicated than playing in 4/4..............you >just >> haven't done it since you were a kid like they have there. > > You can actually get the hang of odd meter really fast if you don't count > in > numbers but in syllables, which takes advantage of our speech centers. > Just > about all European odd meters can be broken down into groups of two and > three > beats. For the two beats say "Taki" and for the three beats say >"Gamela". > So > for two seven beat patterns: > > Taki-Taki-Gamela, Taki-Taki-Gamela,... > or > Gamela-Taki-Taki, Gamela-Taki-Taki,... > > If you ever hear Garaj Mahal perform "Poodle Factory" live, you'll hear > this > to hilarious effect. They get the _whole_ audience to sing along at the > maximum physically possible tempo the following loop: > > Poodle poodle factory, poodle factory > Poodle poodle factory, poodle factory > Poodle poodle factory, poodle factory > Poodle factory, poodle factory, poodle factory > > which a musicologist might call three bars of 11/4 followed by three bars > of 5/4. > > Cheers, > Kevin > www.TheNettles.com > > >