Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Musical Pointillism

Eating pasta, watching television, and happily done downloading some lovely albums. I've no finals on lovely St Patrick's day, which I so love so the plan for tomorrow is to sleep in, sit about, watch television, and drink an beer or two. I'm rather looking forward to it. Perhaps some reading and some writing and music.

got back about half an hour ago from smoking cigars and talking about musical stuff with my friend Dan. He's the drummer percussionist guy from my band Exactly. He's been working on programming a loop on Macs MSP. It's pretty exciting, and he's got awesome stuff going on. I'm pretty psyched, because this means he can do a lot of things with the percussion. The possibilities are really wide ranging. We talked a little about specifics and if the parameters of his program could do what we wanted it too. He automatically came up with some solutions to our problems. It's exciting.

The problems I've been having with my musical pointillism has been in the fact that it's only guitar and a loop. I'm good at creating a static picture, which though certain rhythms will show up and there is movement, is generally a singular picture. Adding this dynamic looped percussion set up gives it a certain amount of motion. There's also the bass line, which I'm using my delay pedal (able to loop for around 3000 msec) for. The trick is that over those three(I may have more, not sure) seconds a certain number of repeats lead to a fade away.

I'm going to have my friend matt, and guitarist in my other band Sans Francisco, play bass this way. The strictures of the delay pedal will counteract some of the melodic things he can't help but do. It's going to be useful.

I have two inputs on my loop pedal, the one I'm using on my guitar, and the other input is ostensibly a Mic input, and what I want to do is get a mic and have my friend Paul who is off and on in Sans Francisco, and is one of the main members of Exactly, will play trombone through the mic and on the loop. It should be useful.

Point is there's a whole bunch of stuff that we want to do with this. It allows for creative input from all parties, (well I don't know if Matt will end up feeling like he's got creative input) and it's got a lot of possibilities. It's my first serious chance to be the primary creative force behind something musical. It's really nice. Being the impetus behind something is great.

There's lots of musical stuff floating around in my head, but it's far more manageable on my drugs, which is super nice. That's what I've been thinking.

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