Three New Improvs

I've been sitting on these for a while. One in particular needed editing. But if I start cutting and pasting I have trouble deciding when to stop, and there's only so much of that I can do and still call it improvised. So mostly I leave them alone even if I meander for a while in the middle. With each one of these it gets harder to come up with things that sound new. But I'm still tinkering with interesting effects to try out.

I am planning to record some things that are actually composed. Until now I've left my compositions to the computer to perform for me, but I have something I've been working on that I can do by myself.

Strangelet Soup

Off to the Festival of Steel

Today I'm heading out to West Virginia to attend the Mannette Festival of Steel so I won't be updating for a couple of weeks.

The Mannette Festival is emblematic of how good it is to be involved in steelpan. Many of the world's foremost players and composers come to the festival to perform with students and amateurs.

Pan is a marvelous instrument, and a marvelous movement in culture worldwide. It is still an infant in accoustic musical instrument years, and much of its potential remains to be explored. It combines the possibilities of rhythm, melody, and harmony into a complex but accessible whole. The classical canon of pan, or the nearest thing to it, is calypso, a genre not so long gone that we can't still understand it and dance to it. Even the most intense competitions of skill on the instrument are festive occasions. All music has the power to move us, but perhaps none is so blatantly fun as steelpan.

It is probably for these same reasons that pan is not often taken seriously. In America we typically hear the instrument as a soundtrack for "Girls Gone Wild" commercials late at night, as generic Caribbean atmosphere in "Under the Sea" and "Kokomo*," and occasionally in synthesized form in the Super Mario games.** It's not that pan is even counterculture; it's simply viewed as a novelty if it's recognized at all. It is a shame for the instrument to be overlooked. It is a great way to get people into music - especially young people.

I'm reminded of how lucky I personally feel to have discovered this instrument. I spent a number of years without a direction in life or any connection to people outside of my close circle of family and friends, and pan played a big part in turning things around. I'm still looking for a way to sustain myself with my creativity, but I feel, for the first time, confidence and satisfaction(and this blog has become a significant aspect of the process).


*A song which mentions some ten different Caribbean islands yet manages to overlook Trinidad and Tobago...

**Not to say that these things are equally disreputable. In fact, as Mario stands for both fun and a high standard of quality, I don't object to that association at all.

Voice of Wind

For the past week or so I've been wrestling with editing an aimless 15 minute improv down to a reasonably sized collage of the best parts. Eventually I realized that I was trying very hard to turn a spontaneous event into a composition, and that perhaps this was foolish, or at least more trouble than it was worth. So I gave up on that and slapped together something new in just the past few hours.

Voice of Wind

It's three pan instruments playing in distinct ranges and each in a different pentatonic scale(adjacent on the circle of fifths). The result is more of an unchanging soundscape than my solo recordings, although paradoxically it took more planning and arrangement.

Accompanying it is a bonus track of the same piece distorted in amusing ways.

The Convenience of Twelve

One thing that I find fascinating about steelpans is the arrangement of notes on the various types of instrument. Since most steelpan instruments consist of multiple drums, it's very convenient that the tuning system used by most of the world has twelve notes. You can take the factors of twelve and relate them directly to the pans and their tonalities.

2 x 6 = 12 ; Double second divides twelve notes into two whole-tone scales of six notes each.
3 x 4 = 12 ; Cello/guitar pan divides twelve notes into three diminished seven chords of four notes each.
4 x 3 = 12 ; Tenor bass and quadraphonic pans divide twelve notes into four augmented triads of three notes each.
6 x 2 = 12 ; Six-bass pan divides twelve notes into six pairs of fourths and fifths.

If there were thirteen notes in an octave, all this would be a complete mess.

The only pan that uses a single drum is the lead or tenor, which is arranged in a circle of fifths. The interesting result of this is that any melodic contour can be easily remapped into a different key by shifting the physical pattern of notes around the circle.

The Mannette Steel Drums website has pictures of the drums and their layouts here.

Two New Things

Two things today.

Objects of Desire / Skin

I've taken to heart something Andy Warhol said - do something once or do it every day. And so I've been putting more work into recording and editing.

The first, boldly named piece, is based an idea that I shall definitely be revisiting at some point. Aside from a few brief diversions, it's based on just two chords, but I was able to get a lot of interesting emotional effects. The tonalities have just enough in common that they feel related, but each makes a distinct impression.

Unfortunately, there is some background noise that crept into this one, but I excised the worst of it and was too happy with the performance to throw it out.

The second piece is more of an experiment. I played lead pan with my fingers, with the microphone placed right up under the drum. It's an interesting sound, I think. The finger taps remind me of the pluck of a harp, and the muffled harmonics are remniscent of gamelan.

It's a bit difficult to play pan this way. It's hard to get a good tone from any but the lowest notes. Playing full chords as I do at the end is tough, which is why there isn't more of it. The breathless pace was also a challenge and exposed the relative lack of coordination in the fingers of my left hand.

Arpeggioland

More noodling. If I'd thought of it, I probably would have put the album name in the ID3 tags as "noodles" when I started this project. Oh well.

Arpeggioland

With this one I've used reverb to simulate an effect like the sustain pedal on a vibraphone. This is another effect that I'd like to explore further in real-time if I can figure out how to do it. I'm imagining a plugged-in pan setup that would have effects pedals for stuff like this. Could be fun.

There was an audio glitch in this one that I had to delete, along with a very small patch of music. Hopefully it isn't too noticeable. I almost left it in, but I knew I'd be bothered by it later if I didn't fix it.

Sorry I haven't been posting in the past week, but I have an excuse: Rehearsals with Ray Holman.

Reverb = Genius

Koto-Scale Improv

I've been experimenting with recording recently, and this is the first thing that I've liked enough to put online. This is about %95 improvised. The simple theme at the beginning was planned, as was the key change, but that's it. I probably wouldn't have uploaded it, except that it sounds so spooky with the reverb.

The scale used for the first half originates with a Japanese string instrument, the koto. This scale, called In-Sen, arises from the way the koto is tuned. Interestingly, this five-note scale can be found within the seven-note scales of western music, but its attitude is quite different.

One of the most pleasant scales is the pentatonic, which can be described as a stack of five perfect fifths, for example F-C-G-D-A. Add two more notes to that stack and you get the seven-note scale of the western world, F-C-G-D-A-E-B. The first and last notes are a diminished fifth apart, and form a harmonic boundary between scale tones and the five other "outside" tones on the circle of fifths. Now, cut out the second and third notes, leaving F-D-A-E-B, and there's the In-Sen scale. It shares a sense of purity with the pentatonic, but the diminished fifth drastically changes its character.

Shuffle Kerfuffle

I'm stealing this idea from the Onion. Ten songs on shuffle:

1.Play Dead - Bjork
Bjork's pretty cool. I guess people have opinions about her. I dunno. She's a great singer. This song has a funky bass line. I like it.

2. Blackbird/Yesterday - The Beatles
This is from the new Love album of mashups and greatest hits. I ignored the Beatles for a long time because I figure things that are that popular probably aren't any good. Turns out, they live up to the hype. Yesterday is one of the most enjoyable songs to sing along with.

3. J-E-N-O-V-A - The Black Mages
One of the best compositions from the Final Fantasy series, in rock form. I love the key changes in this. It keeps shifting up or down a minor third. Strangely affecting.

4. Chocolate City - Parliament
In Parliament's cool guy on the radio series, this one isn't as fun as Wants to Get Funked Up, but it's still cool. And it seems particularly relevant today - "They call it the white house, but that's a temporary condition."

5. jags minns inte - psilodump
This is one of many tracks I got from 8-bit Peoples. If you like the idea of music made with primitive video game sound chips, this is the site for you. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I love that sound.

6. Fugue #7777 - Asuka Sakai
In the video game Katamari Damacy, this is the theme of the King of All Cosmos. It's a funny synth-opera type of thing. I like having this piece of silliness show up in my shuffles, almost as much as Totaka's Song.

7. Slippery People - Talking Heads
I love Talking Heads, especially in their funky phase. I believe that David Byrne is the ultimate cool white man.

8. Lint of Love - Cibo Matto
My sister got me into this band, which is kind of like J-Pop made by Americans of Japanese descent. They have a unique attitude, and there's a lot of humor in their lyrics. I'd say Lint of Love is definitely their best song. It's both funny and musically strong.

9. Metal Man Goes Clubbing - Disco Dan
From the venerable Overclocked Remix. Like a lot of these game remixes, this one goes on a bit long for my tastes, but it's still great fun. It's almost impossible to go wrong with Mega Man 2.

10. Hanging In There - Ray Holman (Mannette Festival 2003)
Ray Holman is one of the greatest pan composers. In his lightning-quick panorama pieces, he packs more excitement into a few chords than some people manage in entire songs. And then he has tunes like Hanging In There and Since You've Gone that draw you in with impressionistic harmonies but get more emotional as they go.