i work better in fear of the stick than in pursuit of the carrot. example . . .

the USA plays that game against Canada sunday. i get a text message Monday – someone is putting together a team for Nationals in street hockey, which is in Philly at the end of the month. they want me to play.

simply put, i’m not in hockey shape, nevertheless hockey tournament shape. if i don’t hit the road, drop some pounds, and get some core conditioning in i will be one sorry, hurting unit.

i can tell myself a thousand times – new year’s resolution, lenten resolution, whatever. lose weight, excercise, dig into my book pile, none of it gets done.

faced with the mental image of dragging ass, sucking wind or puking at a hockey tournament – BAM. i’m insta-allergic to beer, bread and 80% of what’s in the fridge. i’m ready to start the cardio, wondering if i can do a morning AND a night session or if that’d be counter-productive. and i’m thinking abs and back routines because that’s what hurts after a game. or two, or four or six.

the stick is so much more effective

i LOVE the team the States put together.  when you look across and see an opponent that is All-Stars up and down the line, with Hall of Famers in spades, what do you do?  put together your version of what they have?  you’ll never make it.  you need a bunch of kids, too dumb to know that they should lose.  too dumb to know that Canada/Russia is the marquee game, and that the States are an afterthought. 

i love young, dumb kids who won’t quit.  the empty netter in the first match-up to seal the game for the States was the only highlight reel empty netter i’ve ever seen. 

they didn’t show up today and get schooled by the super-pros.  they brought it.  and they brought ALL that Canada – the Home of Hockey - could handle.  down two-zip?  keep bringin it!  losing with under a minute to go?  Keep Bringin It!! 

but alas, no fairy tale ending.  instead the team that was expected to bring home the gold from the tournament escaped .  .  .  by the skin of their teeth. 

judging by the celebration, they might understand that.

in my experience polyrhythms have always included irrational rhythms.  so, let’s start with that. 

Say we take a period of time.  the time it takes between one click on a metronome and the next.  and we chop it into bits.  usually we chop it into the same sized bits out of habit.

• we chop it in half and get eighth notes.  the old [ 1  And  2  And  3  And  4  And]   =  {1  &  2  &  3  &  4  &}
• we chop it into four pieces and get the familiar sixteenth notes [ 1  e  And  uh,  2  e  And  uh,  3  e  And  uh,  4  e  And  uh]  or as i like to write it { 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a }
• we chop it into three and get the triplet thing happening [ 1 trip - let, 2 trip - let, 3 trip - let, 4 trip -let ] or however you count it out.  in here lives the shuffle beat, and a LOT of blues and swingy stuff.

here’s where it gets fun.  you can chop that same slice of time into say FIVE pieces.  drummers do this when they practice a rudimental five stroke roll to a metronome count.  i think guitarists never do it.  the idea should strike 98% of them as a wtf moment. 

of course if the metronome is slow enough, and the piece of time between clicks is long enough, you can cut that piece of time into 7 notes of equal length, 9 notes (which breaks down into 3 sets of 3 notes, so it’s not as funky or odd sounding), 10 (which is a double time five stroke roll), 11, 13, 14, or 15 notes. 

breaking that piece of time into 7 equal pieces is very unusual in the west.  frank zappa used to do it. but i’d say he’s unusual. 

 so here i am, sitting at the snair drum with a metronome playing through the headphones.  the click track is just a little too fast for me to play seven notes per click.  so screw it, no shame it taking a little longer.  i decide to play seven notes per TWO clicks.  we’re chopping up time anyway, and now i can keep up the pace.  every two clicks i’m hitting seven equally spaced notes on the snair. 

you know how you make it a polyrhythm?  add another voice, since poly means like, you know, more than one.  I take the phones off and plug the click track into the monitors.  now, you hear BOTH the rhythms.  my seven notes over the click track’s two notes.  and voila, a 7:2 polyrhythm. 

Seven notes spaced over the time that is usually occupied by Two quarter notes.  ”seven against two” if you’d prefer.

That, is a polyrhythm.   

it is indeed put simply as one rhythm playing against another, but it’s a completely different beast than the contrapuntal independence thing. 

the coolest polyrhythm i ever saw/heard was on zappa’s “the black page” from an NYC recording.  he took 16 notes, which if you’ve ever gone ra-ta-tat around the drumkit you’ve played four on the snair and four on each of the 3 toms.  totally simple.  he chopped it into something along the lines of 5:2, 5:1 and 6:1, so it was 16 notes, in the space of 4 quarter notes, but totally different. 

the simplest polyrhythms are 3:2 where you hit triplets on the ride against straight eighths on the kick/snair.  that’s pretty standard; you can find it in a christmas carol.  it would look something like this . . .

that’s bass cleff stuff, but you can see the note groupings.  3 against 2.

NOW, THAT THAT’S ALL SAID – the word polyrhythm seems to be stuck in a bit of a semantic struggle. 

people will refer to things like layered time signatures as polyrhythms.  RUSH used to do things like have the drums play in 5/4 while the band played in 4/4, and after 20  we’re all back together.  if you play something in 3/4 and i play in 4/4, after 12 we’re back together again.  i understand why you’d want to call that a polyrhythm, and i’m not gonna get all caught up in a struggle over words.  but, i will call timeout and say we need to align our lingo here.

the term i’ve heard for that situation is polymetric. 

oh duh, let me include the typical admonition for any drummers that wander into this fray.  if you really want people to shake their heads – ADD SOME RESTS into all of this.  as rests are like, unbelievably important.

P.S. - i just pushed BUY on a Mandala.  at the moment they come in two parts.  uber-midi controller and software you can run on a decent machine.  i’ll need to upgrade the laptop or an old desktop (or both) to make it come alive.

i think the only time i’ve heard the phrase contrapuntal independence is when i was studying with a jazz drummer in Lancaster many, many moons ago.  he had binders and binders of these rhythms.  the left hand plays a pattern, and the right hand plays a different pattern, and the two mesh.  apparently that is the core behind the phrase “contrapuntal independence”, independent rhythms that mesh to form one larger rhythm.  here’s the quote from Oxford:

“for music to be truly contrapuntal there must always be a balance between independence and interdependence”

okey doke.  and that was that.  i had done it, i’m sure it helped, but the concept was dormant for a long time.  enter a night of internet browsing on african drumming.

in modern western music, a lot of what you hear are two rhythms put together in a way that meshes.  i’m not calling them contrapuntal, but i know that if you take a bass line and a guitar chord progression, you’ve got a song (they mesh).  if you listen to Aerosmith or Guns and Roses, you’ve probably got a second guitar interacting with the first by playing a different line that meshes. 

in traditional african music, they don’t use a lot of things you have to plug in.  makes sense considering.  they use drums - drums that have interesting tonal properties. 

and so i stumbled upon a set of rhythms that were presented as coming from different regions in the continent.  they are offered as the leading rhythms from different peoples, and they come in two parts.  drummer #1 plays a rhythm, and drummer #2 plays a rhythm.  that didn’t strike me right away.  at first i thought it was the top two rthyms from an area.  choose whichever you like best. 

i programmed some of these into a sequencer.  took me forever to remember how to use the damn thing, my industrial metal days are long gone i guess.  but i fire up rhythm #1, and it sounds like someone beating on congos.  not special at all.  and i add a second rhythm, and it turns into what i thought was a “comes with the box” quality drum machine pattern.  if i had come up with it myself i would have been proud. 

once i adjusted the pan, and made one come out of the left speaker and the other rthym come out of the right speaker – BINGO!  the whole room came alive.  i get it

 and so two things hit me:

- i just stumbled on to the feed for a great drums and bass jam.

- I can do this on a kit.

i’ve been pecking away at that second part ever since.  the deal is that if i play it all flat (no accents), i’m not banging out the rhythms.  each of the rhythms has two or three voices.  i think each rhythm would be on one drum, so it’d be like finding three sound zones for this rhythm:

- – - -   – o o – High
- – x x  – - – - Mid
X – - -   – - – - Low

that’s 1 e & ah, 2 e & ah and you’re done.  terribly simple, right?  that’s the left hand part.  the counter rhythm is:

x - - x   x – - -  High
- – - -     – - X X  Mid

just two voices, with the right hand. 

if i had a mandala, the left hand part would be different zones on it and it would be godly. 

at any rate, last night i finally made it all come together.  i kinda sat down and decided i wasn’t going anywhere until i got it, even if it took days.  i have a loose grasp on it now, after pecking away at it forever.  yay.  AND . . . as i’m tapping on everything, it strikes me, this is some bad-ass contrapuntal independence going on!

so that’s my intro to african rhythms.  it takes me three or four weeks to digest the first one.  and it’s in 2/4.  god help me when i like, bring triplets into the equation, lol.

i was going to ship any winnings off to a charity that does microloans in third world situations.  instead they’re getting a bill for 3 buy ins.  i’m sure they could do without supporters like me

in other news, i put a couple of pork butts in the oven last night to make a pulled pork for the tavern tonight.  they take 13 hours to do, so i have to put them in at night for the next day.  here’s what happens.  they’re coated in a spice rub.  the heat hits those spices and they release an aroma that makes my stomach say “YESS – gimme some!!!”  this happens while the meat is 13 hours away from being ready to eat. 

so for 13 hours my house smells like this, and my stomach is churning overtime in anticipation.  why do i do this to myself?

i haven’t been blogging lately.  i figure it’s because:

A) i have no poker thoughts to share and

B) i haven’t found myself at the ‘puter in a good story telling mode

but, to the good, i haven’t posted up a half dozen whiney bitch rants either.  tonight i decided i’d post up “ something, anything, even if it’s wrong” over a Heineken Dark.

i put down poker essentially, after deciding that i should play during awake hours when i can concentrate.  it turns out that instead of being drawn to cards during the day, i’ve been either performing passing duties (say, plowing snow, doctor’s visits, etc.) or being drawn towards WORK. 

lately it’s been more passing duties.  hopefully this week i’m back to ‘puter work by wednesday.  i’m waiting on a new power supply for my main ‘puter, so i’m typing this out on an old machine that i never threw out.  yay for the pack rat.  in the meantime, the bar is there to keep me occupied if i feel the need.

lent starts wednesday.  so, it’s mardi gras and valentine’s day back to back?  heh.

i’m off to bed.  hopefully tomorrow brings some neat olympic activity, and a head start to the week’s endeavors

think i’ll start working on it in the morning.

at 1am the singer calls it quits.  and i know he had more in him, and i’m thinking “take a look at this crowd.  if we just make noise for the next half hour the bar could ring in a bundle!”  what happened was that the guy who was in charge had said to the singer “look dude, it’s 1 o’clock.  look at this place.  enough is enough man.” 

they couldn’t keep up at the bar and handle the crowd, and were all out of gas for the trying.  basically, they cried uncle.  i’ve never played a place so packed that the people shoveling the cash into the registers were overrun to the point of pulling the plug.

it was a GREAT time that turned into an unexpectedly BIG Great Time.

and i’m gonna tell you that at this place the band sets up in the shape of an “L”, with the drumkit as the bottom horizontal line, and the rest of the team as the vertical line.  i couldn’t see past the bass player to the singer/guitarist #1/guitarist #2/harp player because the crowd pushed into the way.  now, the crowd that did the pushing was mostly hot young chicks who were asking “does this pose make my ass look hot?” the answers were “yes”, “yes” and “yes”.  the peeks at the tramp stamp/whale tail combos were nice as well. 

i set the drums up in the front room, and put the cases in the back before i started.   i waited until twenty of two to start breaking down because there was no way i could make my way through the crowd to the stage with drum cases.  that’s completely insane. 

College Football – there are two local products in the major NCAA ranks right now.  the fullback for the Pitt Panthers went to school with my daughter, and the quarterback for the B.C. Eagles lives down the block from the bar.  they both played yesterday.  the panthers won their game, and Hyno did fine.  Shinski took on the USC trojans and made a game of it (although to be honest i didn’t get too see the better part of the game.  still, he didn’t make a goober of himself, ahem, Notre Dame, ahem, interception, cough, cough.  i know, i’m an ass.)

Sunday Football – today was probably a great day in the NFL with lots of close games, playoff implications galore, yadda, yadda, yadda.  i spent it watching hockey.  i stumbled onto the World Juniors (under 20?) Championships.  AWESOME hockey!  the announcers were fantastic!  they didn’t simply tell you what was happening in the game, as if my eyes weren’t working or something.  they announced mistakes, analyzed coaching, talked about match ups between players and styles of play, and just tons of insightful stuff. 

it was like watching a good poker video. 

i can’t tell all of what’s going on in a hockey game.  i get to see what One television camera shows me.  that’s it.  they filled in a lot of the blanks. 

plus, the players played a style that looked like the street ball that i play, on ice.  i was mesmerized.  (btw, the U.S. is 2-0 so far).  i followed that up with a Flyers game.   

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!