#102

Nuits sonores (the other side of Nectarine’s vinyl) made it on litterally ALL my playlists in the first six months of 2015. There’s a lot of interesting time signatures in there too if I remember well.

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#103

so good, thank you!
yes, what we call a 'drum kit, and the jazz cats call a 'trap set,
is really short for 'contraption… meaning that with a hi-hat pedal, and a kick-drum pedal,
one person can play all the drums by themselves, like a drum machine.
and back in the day, they all had to have 'chinese wood blocks!
we grew up wanting to play a 'drum set.
like john bonham /elvin jones/ and horsemouth wallace play -Amazingly Well!
and really…the rhythm happens between two, or more people…playing a shaker, a clave, bongos, snare, a big drum, congas, whatever…
ck out Bombino’s got a whole person to hit a rubber ball in a bucket of water with a shoe!

even modern jazz, the bass is the bass drum! (playing four on the floor like 'house music)
it’s like another discussion on this forum about leaving one sound source off of the quantization scheme, it may make it more possible to play like this in electronic music.

IMG_0457.JPG2448×2448 1.11 MB

peace
Also, does the extreme digital vocal processing in the above track make it 'electronic music?

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#104

spectacular thread!

straight 4/4 time signature but 6 bar rotation of harmonies gives this old BoC track a very nice quality:

just thinking about modulating higher-up timing structures. which then gets you thinking about time granularity in general… curtis roads’ microsound, pauline oliveros deep listening… some related branches here.

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#105

Haha: AUTOTUNE!
(It’s such a strange thing, there are so many R&B tracks with autotune that I hate, but I’ve heard many of these Ethiopian songs that sound so great with it. I’ve got an Autotune-Love/Hate-Relationship :smile: )[quote=“abalone, post:103, topic:3828”]
Also, does the extreme digital vocal processing in the above track make it 'electronic music?
[/quote]
The Autotuning makes it a fashionably ‘contemporary studio’ production for sure :slight_smile:

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#106

thanks for linking to the partial history of set drumming…it really is such a recent development in western music that i find fascinating!

regarding the tigrinya stuff posted above: the drums are machine

you raise an interesting point (that’s been touched on above) . what is the threshhold for marking a song “electronic”?

based on previous posts it seems if the drumming is synthesized or computer sequenced samples = YES

if not = NO

i dont think people are counting amped guitars either or i wouldve posted about hella much sooner

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#107

I’ve recently started following the guitar pedal world and it’s really hard to ignore the similarities to the modular synth world. (and of course there are many examples of actual crossover)

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#108

sneaking odds into 4/4 thru measure or tempo tricks is great entertainment

heres one of my fav examples

also, for some reason, your post made me remember fell shouldve been ground zero for a discussion like this

https://soundcloud.com/pdis_inpartmaint/mark-fell-multistability-1

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#109

couldnt find this all day https://alisoncarney.bandcamp.com/track/in-high-places
because i couldnt remember whether it was saturn never sleeps or j*davey

it was neither

#110

[disclaimer - no electronic music in this post]

I wasn’t going to share this until I saw you were a singer - this piece is to me the most intuitive use of mixed meter I’ve seen/heard - the time signature changes to complement each line of the poem:

Also, since the topic of dancing in usual meters came up, check out Balkan dance music. The time signatures are wild. I got into a conversation with a drummer once (and really the drummer is the most important person in this kind of band, right?) and she said she learned how to drum these rapidly fluctuating time signatures by first learning the traditional Balkan dances that accompany them. 11/8+13/8+5/4 isn’t so weird when you know the dance steps that would occur in each measure apparently. Of course, these are traditional social dances, not club music.

http://freemusicarchive.org/tag/zlatne_uste_balkan_brass_band/

For what it’s worth, this weekend I went to a conference and one of the presenters talked about unusual/uncertain meters in DAW’s and notation programs. He shared the music of one of his students who wrote using JUST the piano roll in FL studio, and the student disregarded any barlines. He played some of the student’s music and it was great - it had a sense of countless polyrhythms but with a rhythmic fluidity I think a lot of adult composers would be happy to achieve.

Personally, I wish DAWs were a little smarter when it came to subdividing measures - is my 7/8 time 3+4 or 4+3 or 2+5 or 2+3+2? The few times I’ve dabbled with this I ended up making own click tracks using hi-hat samples.

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#111

Heh. Don Ellis again - he picked up Milchio Leviev (who is Bulgarian) as pianist on the “Tears of Joy” session; there’s a track on there called “Bulgarian Bulge” which is 33/16, with the bridge in 36!

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#112

Ha ha nice, listening to it right now - awesome!

#113

Love Don Ellis, but don’t know his non-soundtrack work really all that much. I’ll have to investigate.

I think the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to embrace 4/4. I think there’s something innately satisfying and it is hard-wired in me, as it probably is in many of us. I also feel, quite often, that exploring complex time signatures as an American/westerner/what-have-you feels forced or inauthentic. Twenty years ago in my teenage math-rock/Rush jamming years I wouldn’t have thought about it in those terms, but yeah, fundamentally there’s so much room to explore even ‘just’ within 4/4 that I don’t feel a strong urge to explore other time signatures unless it happens naturally. Here’s a tune I jammed out on on my morning walk that I guess seems to be in 4/4 but still has some interesting elements going on throughout.

That’s not to say the discussion isn’t interesting or that exploring alternate time signatures isn’t important and valuable, of course. Just figured I’d share my personal counterpoint.

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#114

thx,
I agree…

#115

I probably posted this in another thread at some point, but this is a demo of a friend of mine’s “Stringvencer”, which is basically an elastic ‘timeline’. He shoots out and in to Ableton using this as part of his workflow.

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#116

hummm yessss… I’m hacking (right now) on a new version of my midilooper (based round a monome grid & mpd32 this time, ditching the quneo) & reconsidering the design decision in original software for 96ppqn ‘master’ timebase. The trick I played with version 1 was to ‘upsample’ incoming 24ppqn midi clock by timing the incoming ticks & filling in the gaps (or simply generate 96ppqn directly if master)…

Kind of thinking now, maybe 96 is just overkill. For 120bpm that translates to 5ms…

Anyone care to share any of their private hunches or more systematic knowledge on the importance/sensitivity of microtiming for ‘unquantised’ sequencing?

#117

Leviev draws from a huge well of folk or gypsy tradition in Bulgaria and the Balkans, where odd time signatures are fairly common. Here’s the man performing the piece himself on piano.

and one of his earlier compositions

an hour of much more folk/roma music here, odd sigs and everything.

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#118

Awesome! Thank you. Everything really is on YouTube.

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#119

Yes, that higher structure stuff gets called hypermeter.

I really like this from James Tenney back in the early 70s, which is making a slightly different point, but still worth a read:

I think of form as the same thing, on a larger temporal scale, as what’s called content on a smaller scale. That old form/content dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be the substance or content of some sound — say, a string quartet — is really the result of forms — formal shapes and structures at a microscopic, or “microphonic” level: particular envelopes, wave-forms, and sequences of these — details in the signal. All form is just the same thing at a larger level, involving spans of time over, say, five or ten or twenty minutes or more. It’s precisely the same thing physically. When you begin to see it that way, you can begin to feel it musically. So my interest in form is identical to my interest in sound (laughs).

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Quotes on Music & Composition
#120

I think this fits well into this discussion

Kinda like the beginning of idm, in a way

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#121

I’m going to throw the concept of the clave into the mix. Clave (or key) has it’s roots in african music, but is most well known in latin american music in the son clave or rhumba clave. These are repeating subdivisions of a duple or triple based meter (generally 2 bars of 2/4 or 6/8) that form the rhythmic foundation of popular cuban dance rhythms like the mambo, rhumba, son, songo, timba, etc. The clave serves as a framework for the rest of the instruments to hang from and syncopate rhythmically.

It can also serve as a pivot for subdivision modulation between duple or triple, as demonstrated here by Horatio Hernandez:

And if that’s too didactic for you, check this video of him solo on the kit, maintaining the rhumba clave on his left foot almost continuously through various subdivisions, permutations, and choppy nuttiness on top. Left foot clave starts around a minute in and warning, the is at a drummers festival so it gets pretty showy:

I find as I grow older that I’m less interested in chop-heavy, count the numbers heavy prog or math music (as has been mentioned by earlier posters). The most interesting odd signature (or perhaps non-duple) music is that which has an inherent groove that you can feel and potentially dance to (or at least allows you to entrain, even if bodily motion ain’t your thing).

A clave can serve to anchor the groove and your orientation within the meter. To wit, check out this Mehldau trio recording of All the Things You Are in 7/8:

the clave here is 4+4+3+3, and you can hear it anchoring all of the phrasing, solos, etc. throughout the tune.

Once you practice a particular meter/clave enough, you can begin to feel that underlying rhythm, stop counting, and start really playing in the meter, be it 4/4 or 11/16.

And for some gratuitous and showy both extreme mathy-ness and feel in one song, the Bad Plus is a bit of a guilty pleasure:

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