RHYTHM 03: Ultimate Rhythmic Freedom
1. Beats or no beats. You can decide if your music has a beat or is “free time”. Music without a beat can still have structure, even a rhythmic structure, but it won’t be based on regularly spaced beats or patterns. It might be more natural sounding or more “conversational” or perhaps more soulful and […]
Read more...RHYTHM 02: The Essence of Rhythm
In the most general terms, rhythm just refers to the placement of musical events in time. Our brains and experience dwell eternally in the present moment. Contained in this present moment is a well-calibrated sense of what has happened in the “recent” past- and a sensation of “flow”. That flow could be described as us […]
Read more...RHYTHM 01: Current Music Tech’s (ab)use of Time-Signatures
Patterning 2 is an iOS app that creates rhythmic patterns using powerful graphical tools. Unlike most drum machine apps, Patterning 2 gives us incredible freedom to explore unusual beat divisions. The app’s short-sighted use of time-signatures imposed a frustrating limitation onto an otherwise wonderful system. The crux of the issue is that we need a […]
Read more...PROJECTS: 2019 Feb
MIDI CONTROL BOX I’m working on a custom MIDI control surface with knobs, sliders and switches. What makes this device unique– compared to commercially available ones– is that it will allow me to connect external controls and switches, and it will have eight high-resolution controls. A really nice man named Jerry Patrasso who runs a […]
Read more...