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Looper's Delight
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Hey Rick. It is refreshing to hear the voice of someone as eloquent as you. I too am a seasoned musician that spent the majority of my life-35 years as a guitarist performing R & B and funk here in Detroit and through out the US. I am relatively new to this wondrous music technology explosion! Thank you United States Military for facilitating the whole thing and creating the internet. Whoops! I don't want to get political or wave flags. I'd just like to thank you for your inspired and intelligent thoughts. As a trained musician, I looked down on 'Techno' and for years I resisted the technology. About a year ago out of curiosity I bought Reason. Now have thousands and thousands of dollars tied up in this powerful musical venue. Thank you Bill Gates, Steve jobs! On Sep 25, 2007, at 4:55 PM, Rick Walker wrote: > To me, the sampling revolution that has so influenced modern music > in the last 25 years > has given us the potential to invent and discover new uses for sounds. > > I'm a drummer and have been , this year, for exactly 40 years, but > I frequently resent the > hegemony that the drumset has had over world popular music for a > long time. > > The hippest thing about drum machines , to me, is to use sounds > that AREN'T trapset drum sounds > so that we can have new and cool ways to experience grooving. > > That's why I've been such a ceaseless advocate for the software > program Fruity Loops (FLStudio Producers Edition > as it is now, more stately, referred to). It has a drum machine > interface that is really easy to use but you just direct > it towards any samples that you have on your hard drive and you can > make anything be a drum machine. > > > Having also been a multiple percussionist all of my life I realize > that one of the great things about the drum set is > that it has bass (kick drum) , middrange (snare drums, tom toms) > and treble (hi hats and cymbals) timbral components. > > When, as an example, I play with a folk or acoustic pop artist, I > will frequently use an instrument like a darbukka (dumbec) > or djembe as an ersatz drum machine...............substituting open > tones for kicks, slaps for snare drums and light,non-accented > strokes as hi hats. > > Drum machines can do the same thing..................we can make > ersatz drumsets up using our imagination, some DSP processing > and some clever sound design (note: tune sounds you have way up > high or way down low and find new contexts for them in their > new stretched tunings). > > To me the Timbral revolution in modern music is every bit as > important as the Rhythmic revolution (one that was greatly > accelerated by > the whole early 80's world beat movement that brought a lot of > ethnic- and sometimes, obscurely ethnic, rhythmic and timbral > influences into > Western pop music and jazz). > > Synthesizers, Sampling and radical DSP processing have really > changed the sonic palette of modern music in ways I find very > exciting as > a musician and a composer. > > The problem with drum machines in their ubiquity, as I see it, is > that, like the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, 90% of the people who use them > don't really get very creative with them. > > Remember, when you pat out a rhythm on your guitar with muted > strings and loop it.............you are just creating a digital > drum machine. > It may be more creative than pushing pattern 10a on a drum machine > but it's the same thing: a sample being created and sequenced > in real time. > > The sadly lamented late Joe Zawinul said that a beautiful > constructed Synthesizer patch is every bit as beautiful as a > Stradivarius violin. > I actually agree with him. > > With drum machines, we just need to strive for the 'beautifully > constructed' part of that statement. > > Program on and remember............................someone may not > want to listen to your computer drum programming but > I don't like to listen to bluegrass, frankly (even the best there > is). Both expressions of human creation are equally valid > and as such are music with a capital M.