| << LA, David Arnay | 2004 > June | The Corporation >> |
Thursday, 17 June 2004
Rhythmic adventures ::
The piece I’ve been working on for the last three weeks has been going slowly. I’d recently read in a David Torn Electronic Musician interview about how he spends a lot of time creating a bed, all for the purpose of eventually playing over it and capturing early takes. That still seems like a fine approach, but I agonized over that bed. After two and half weeks I had only two and a half minutes of unpolished music! (I guess that shouldn’t surprise me—work’s been intense, preparing two presentations and demos for a conference at the end of the month, and finishing some software.)
My piece’s basic track is an evolving loop that eventually settles into a steady 6 x 4/4 pattern. I worked backwards from the place where the rhythm stabilized. But even there I got temporarily stuck trying to find the tempo. After many attempts at playing click tracks, I finally opened the loop in Peak, found the sample offsets of each repetition, used a spreadsheet to find and average the deltas, and found the magic tempo of 125.7581 bpm. I’d thought I was done, but discovered, the hard way, that the 24-beat phrase actually had 22 beats earlier in the piece, and they were far from steady. The breakthrough was when I locked the ending down to a bar boundary, gave up on trying to find a metronomic tempo in the intro, and just played.
I must have played sonic-sculpture for a week, on and off, in the intro. I ended up redoing large portions of all the tracks besides the originals; every new track seemed to highlight more rhythmic inconsistencies in the others.
Sunday I finally made it to the rhythmically steady part. Last night I did a few takes of piano solos for the ending.
But after all the work with micro-rhythmic problems, tonight I had macro-rhythmic problems—I’d thought I’d repeat and elaborate on an 8-bar melody that was part of the original improvisation over the 6-bar loop, but of course the cadences didn’t line up well at all. Tonight I found a 30-bar chord progression (16 + 14) that fit both the 6-bar loop and the 8-bar melody. The kicker was when I discovered that it lined up well with the piano solo I’d liked best from last night. Playing jazz standards with C on Sunday seems to have opened a door; I found myself using more extended harmonies than in quite awhile.
| << LA, David Arnay | 2004 > June | The Corporation >> |