NEWS
Saturday, June 30, 2005
New mp3 of Skip To My Lou Variations Posted
Well.....gee whiz! I didn't know it was one whole year since I updated these GrooveZONE pages. How time flies! Anyway, I wanted to share with you one multitrack arrangement of Skip To My Lou variations that I did in my home studio fairly recently. It is a high quality mp3, encoded at 192kbps, and is about 3.1 MB in size, so if you are on a dial-up connection to the internet, you might want to think twice about downloading it as it may take a while:
This is a "Latin" or straight-8ths version of Skip To My Lou, and the melody is actually stated at least once in the beginning on electric guitar. There are two electric dulcimer accompaniment parts: one part is made up of these quick chord stabs, and the other is a faded-in track of two-handed tapping. The bass and keyboard parts are a MIDI loop I made with an Alesis QS6 keyboard and a Yamaha FS1R sound module. I like to think of these synth parts as my "enlightened click track" -- because I get much more inspired playing along with these tracks than I do with the dreadful CLICK-click-click-click that you get built in to the sequencer or audio software that you're using.
The other interesting thing about this multitrack arrangement is that I tried my best to actually tell a story with the evolution of the variations: it starts out with a fairly literal statement of the original melody (rhythmic displacement, anticipation, and syncopation being the main devices I used on this first iteration) -- progresses to a kind of very sunny, Caribbean vibe with the major 6th chords on I and dominant 9th on V -- and winds up solidly in blues territory with a dominant 7th chord on I and a 7#9 chord on V (you don't get much more tense than a 7#9!!), complete with a decending blues line in the electric guitar lead that has absolutely nothing to do with Skip.
I've taken a breather on the multitrack arrangements for now, in favor of putting together a bunch of 4-equidistant string fingerpicking solos........kind of a demo for playing coffehouses, house concerts, and other solo gigs, as well as comprising some sort of audio documentation for the DulciTheory email newsletter.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Rhythm Charts Posted for the GrooveZONE Band Repertoire CD!
The first 9 cuts of the repertoire CD are now posted as rhythm charts. Hopefully I can finish out the charts to the remaining 7 tracks soon.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Free mp3 Downloads from the March 2004 12-bar CD!
If you click on the "Mar" button near the top of this page, you will get the page that has all the rhythm charts for the March 2004 12-bar CD. Below certain charts, you will see a blue, hotlinked mp3 with a file-size and time in parentheses. If you right-click on this, it will allow you to download an mp3 audio file of the full-length audio track that is on the CD. February will be coming soon.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Name Change
First of all, the Professional Development Program (or pro_devel) has now become the GrooveZONE Program. You'll want to change your web links to:
http://www.jcrmusic.com/groovezone/
There are no major changes to the structure of the program, but I think that GrooveZONE is a really good descriptive title for a program that teaches you how to build grooves and then improvise over them.
March CD Now Available!
Yes....I know we're in the middle of May, but I have finally completed the March 12-bar CD. If you want to check out the contents and see some of the rhythm charts, click on the "Mar" button above.
February Rhythm Charts and Track Listing Now Posted
I finally got the complete track listing for the February CD done, along with most of the chord progressions. There are a few featured rhythm charts at the top of the February page as well: click on the "Feb" button above to get the details.
So How Do I Get the CDs?
If you have a burning desire to build grooves on the mountain dulcimer -- and you love to improvise -- and you really like the idea of turning the dulcimer into a kickin' rhythm section for pop, rock, jazz and blues styles, then you are going to need the GrooveZONE CDs. You can email me at: jerry@jcrmusic.com for details on how to order.
Friday, February 6, 2004
The digital audio revolution continues! The February CD will take a little while longer than I had originally planned, mostly due to having the opportunity to constantly improve it here at home. It still should be ready to go out sometime around the middle of this month.
Here is a taste of what's coming on the February CD:
- more grooves
- Hush Little Baby: |D / / / |A7 / / / | / / / / |D / / / :||
- |D / / / |G / / / | Am / / / |G / / / :||
- Touchstone 2004 GZ
- Temperance Transformations GZ (with melodic guitar part)
- 12/8:|D / / / |/ / / / | Bm / / / |/ / / / |Em / / / |/ / / / | A7 / / / |A7 GMaj7 F#m7 Em7 :||
Somehow I've been bitten by a Carribean/Rasta bug. This kind of lazy, shuffly feel -- combined with my current obsession with 12/8 and all the cross rhythms -- has made Hush Little Baby a kind of revolution. And not only in the rhythmic parameter, either! It turns out that this 2-chord "tension/release" I - V7 - I...... is one heck of a reference structure for designing melodic improvisation. We have 6-5 and lower sibling 4-3 suspensions into the A7 ----- and 9-8 and sibling 4-3 suspensions back home to D:
|D / / / |D/A A7 / / | / / / / |G6 D / / :||
Monday, February 2, 2004
As I continue to make progress in ProTools, I'm interested in sharing some of my ongoing projects. So just for fun, I added a dulcimer track to the Temperance Transformations GZ (Groove Zone) guitar. It is a first take, like most of the quick-and-dirty stuff, so it could use some refinements and subtle changes of dynamics. Maybe it will give you some ideas as to how the texture of a project can be enhanced and augmented using the unique sound of the dulcimer strum. I used an extremely flexible celluloid pick for the first time through the AABB, then switched to a kind of homemade brush made from piano wire cut up into 3" strips and held together with masking tape. (WARNING: this is VERY damaging to the finish on your dulcimer! You will have to get some sort of guard for the soundboard and the surface of the fingerboard if you want to try this metallic, springy texture.)
Here is the link to the guitar/dulcimer mp3:
temperance_gz_gtr_md.mp3
(this one is twice as large -- 3 MB -- as the first guitar track, because it is a true stereo mp3.)
Let me know how these mp3 files work for you. To my ear they are fine for our quick-and-dirty purposes, and I notice a definite quality boost from recording digitally in the first place: the files I had to transfer to computer from my Yamaha MT100II multitrack cassette are definitely more muddy and raunchy sounding.
Sunday, February 1, 2004
Upstairs in my building workshop I have an old PowerMac 7500 with a slightly faster than stock processor (a 180Mhz 604e) running Digidesign's ProTools 4. After trying unsuccessfully to record digital audio in ProTools to the same 1GB drive that I'm booting from, I went about putting various smaller SCSI drives on the second internal bus. I tried three different drives with various SCSI IDs which would put the audio drive into slave mode. No joy resulted from this three hours worth of frustration, as these second internal drives would invariably fail to spin up or mount on the desktop. I could only conclude that there was something fried on the power or the SCSI connector for this second internal SCSI bus.
So then it was back to the drawing board: I had a known-good 1GB drive in an external enclosure, so I hooked that to the external SCSI connector. After a few false starts, I finally had the external drive available to me on the desktop, so I initialized it and put new drivers on it. When I got up and running again in a ProTools session, I was able to get the audio to stripe to the new external 1GB drive. I guess it has fast enough access, too, because I didn't get the Digidesign Audio Engine (DAE) errors like I did with the boot drive.
So this is the beginning of what I hope will be a good "quick and dirty" way of giving you some timely mp3 files in between the times when I go to Tim's to record the monthly CDs.
(I only give you the gory details in this case because the whole adventure is one of the most daunting and frustrating experiences I've ever had with computers. Yes, you can turn your computer into a recording studio.)
Anyway, the tune I got done is something I'd like you to play along with, and perhaps capture some of my guitar accompaniment ideas on your dulcimers. The tune is Temperance Reel in G: there is no hint of the melody in my accompaniment part, though you can certainly try some of the tune's phrases and melodic design.
There are two main points you should keep in mind with this groove:
1.) The rhythmic structure is a lazy, dreamy 12/8, with lots of anticipations and syncopations. I tried to keep this guitar part really sparse and structural, with a fair amount of attention to the bass line.
2.) The B Part has some cool chord substitutions: use your ear to try and figure these out (I resisted the strong Lydian urge to play a CMaj7#11 on the IV, mainly because this tune wound up kind of folky sounding, and the thicker jazz chords didn't add to the feel.)
I've been blowing some melodic ideas against this progression, and I am really turned on to the 12/8 polyrhythms or "cross-rhythms" as they are sometimes called. When I get some stuff that I can live with, I will commit it to a ProTools session and mp3, and you can hear what I'm talking about.
Here is the mp3 file -- it is about 1.6 MB, which shouldn't be too painful even on a dial-up:
temperance_gz_gtr.mp3
Friday, January 30, 2004
I formatted the Curriculum, References, and Devices pages so that they reflect the rest of the formatting on the site. I know that the January CDs have reached California - finally! - so I'm anxious to hear how everyone is doing with the play-along experience, and how well the music notation works.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Well, it looks like I might have gotten the beginnings of the GrooveZONE web site up finally! Good timing, too, considering the January CD should be in your hands by now. I even have a page dedicated to the January CD.