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Accompanying yourself with live dance beats



The british magazines Computer Music and Future Music will
have an article every month based on deconstructing a song by
a popular electronica artist and showing you how it was created.

Go check some back issues of these wonderful magazines.
They come with a DVD with incredible free music software,
hundreds of samples and all the samples you need to
reconstruct that month's featured artists' selected track.


Also, most of the dance styles on earth are based on the rhythms
that are used to construct them.     Though harmony is an important
part of these dance musics,   rhythm and timbre are more important in
defining the genre (there are, of course,  exceptions to this rule).

For what it is worth,  I have purposefully studied literally hundreds
of dancer rhythms from all over the world for the last 30 years of my life.
I analyzed them, in particular with respect to how 
drum/percussion/bass/guitar/keyboard
and horn lines interact with each other.

I put out the first volume of an encylcopedia called Global Beats and 
World 
Pop Styles , Volume One
in 1989 which featured rhythmic transcriptions of 246 of the more popular 
grooves on the planet
from 48 countries.

Anyway,  not finding any literature in English (and I really researched 
heavily)  I sat down and tried
to make sense of the most common ways that people use to create 
arrangements 
in dance music tracks from
acoustic folk rhythms to a lot of electronica.    I concentrated heavily 
on 
dance music because it was my
love (this then, would preclude a lot of current electronic like Glitch, 
Microsound, and other musics that
are specficially non-dance oriented).

I have been teaching a four hour long course called the Rhythm Intensive 
for 
about the last 20 years that
distills all the things I learned from all of that analysis and sets out a 
wholistic way of looking at
rhythm in arrangement and improvisation.   It is a very simple system and 
I 
have taught it to over 2500 private
students including over 500 non-drumming melodic musicians (and producers, 
arrangers, tap dancers, et. al.)

I mention this because after NAMM is over, I will be setting up a studio 
in 
my home to
be able to do live lessons on video cam/chatting sessions.
If you are interested in taking this course,  let me know and we can set 
up 
a time to connect.
Also,  please pass the word that I'll be making this offering.

good luck with your music
Rick