drum rudiments

I recently had to coach a drummer who was learning some rudiments like the rough half-drag and nine-stroke roll. Rudiments are really cool -- in fact I think anything is really cool that bumps up one's technique. But here's a site that not only does the rudiments on the snare but also in the context of a beat and a fill...nice applications!

rudiments from freedumlessons.com

On this page you can access all of the 40 rudiments offered, plus (scrolling down) there is a good description of each. Many, many thanks to Lionel Duperron for playing!

overtone singing

What is overtone singing? If you've ever heard Tibetan Buddhist chant you'll know. But here's a short, helpful tutorial.

Basically the tongue (and lips and so on) in this type of singing changes the overtones that are produced while on a constant fundamental pitch producing a "bagpipe" type sound -- i.e. a high changing melody over a low drone. For some examples on Amazing Grace:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO4Uh-Mini4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgyJ547oA4I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWYSW4vfcA&feature=fvw

This ties in to the post on subtractive synthesis, and makes clear that there's a lot more going on when one pitch is sounded than one commonly thinks.

tab snobs

I know that there are many, many guitarists out there who are "tab snobs", i.e. completely against the idea of communicating a music score in any other form than in familiar music notation. There are of course many, many, many more guitarists who can't read music or know where any notes are located on their instrument. So the tab snobs' position is somewhat understandable. But historically they're on the shakiest of ground, because if we go back and look at lute music from the 16th and 17th centuries it was only written in... (drum roll please) ...tablature. For the briefest of introductions check this site out. Also the Frederick Noad anthologies of Renaissance and Baroque music have some info regarding this, plus of course the Harvard Dictionary of Music, etc.

The reason that tab is useful is that it locates exactly where notes are to be played. In classical guitar scores this is settled by using a lot of extra information: fingerings, strings, positions, etc, which in a sense amounts to a tablature overlay on the score. I think that only offering up the notes without any indication of position and so on is lazy, unless we're only concerned about analyzing the notes and not playing them.

vinnie moore solo from morning star

Yup, more Vinnie (Moore). This is his solo from "Morning Star", the opening track from the album Time Odyssey (1988). The solo begins at 1:38. Click on the gif to get a bigger image.



There are a million great things to discuss about this solo, but I'll leave that for a bit later. I did forget to put in the chords over which he's playing, but they're not hard to hear. The main point is learn the solo, or parts you like, take it/them apart and see what else you can come up with!

There's a short Vinnie lick in this post.

negativland

So I dig Craig Baldwin's films a lot. The first one I saw (on DVD) a few years back was Spectres of the Spectrum. The next one was Sonic Outlaws, which takes as its main topic or point of departure a lawsuit that arose between the San Francisco based band Negativland and U2 (or perhaps more accurately U2's record label Island Records). I'll spare you the details here but I will give a shout out to Negativland. Check out that site. Basically the band and the film explore the issue of copyright, fair use and artwork creation from the point of view of originality. The word "explores" might be too generous, so let's say that there is an exploration down a certain avenue (mainly an anti-copyright one). Legitimate issues are raised, some breezed over...it's a worthwhile conversation.

naked women back at goodbye blue monday

Yes, playing again with Naked Women at Goodbye Blue Monday.
Tonight at 9pm.

the lineup:
Tom Blatt: bass
Matthew Polashek: sax
Charles Ramsey: guitar
Tom Swirly: electronic winds
Raymond Todd: 'bone + spoken word
Zebra: drums

...and Goldiva handling the dancing chores...

subtractive synthesis

A million years ago when I was very young I heard Wendy (but at that point in time Walter) Carlos' Switched On Bach. I think that it was the last movement of the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto that made my jaw drop and just sucked me into that world -- I desperately wanted a huge synthesizer that filled up rooms with equipment.

I only new the name of the synthesizer: Moog. I had no concept of "subtractive" or "analog" and so on. The first synth I ever got (much later) was the Roland Alpha Juno-2. Technically it's subtractive (it has digital oscillators and filters, etc, but has an analog sound). The only thing that made that hard was (1) there were no knobs -- all of the controls were buried inside and accessible only one parameter at a time; (2) I had no idea how synthesizers worked and consequently only made use of the presets occasionally making some modifications.

The thing is subtractive synthesis isn't hard to understand at all. And grasping it really makes it easier to understand what might happen when you start tweaking the parameters. (By the way this is absolutely not true of other types of synthesis like FM -- frequency modulation -- found on the Yamaha DX-7.) And these days software synths are cheap and easily available.

So what is subtractive synthesis? Here's my terse and possibly awkward definition: taking a basic sound (waveform) and filtering (i.e. subtracting out certain harmonics from) it to give a new (desired) sound. And if you're using a synth (software or otherwise) that's subtractive and want a little more info about it/them google the term and root around. Here are a couple of helpful sites:

DarkSonus
Yala
Wikipedia (this has a nice comparison with the human voice to make the mechanisms more easily understandable -- of course it's wikipedia and could change in a minute)

Here's a diagram I lifted from a KVR wiki which visually clarifies what's happening in this type of synthesis:



Of course in the end it's certainly not necessary to know how a synth works to use it effectively. But that knowledge can help you and aids in conceptualizing how sound works more generally.