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milford graves: "we're taught about measures, you know, we're talked about pulse beats. all right, so we can count 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. if you make the distance between 1 and 2 different between 2 and 3, people say "you're screwing up the tempo, man, you're out of tempo." >
so i've known some people who say the best way to play in tempo is to get a metronome. oh my gracious. and forget about atomic clocks now, too exact. but you know what? the body, the heart doesn't have the same time length between each contraction and relaxation of heart beat. >
the difference between ba-boom and the next ba-boom: if they're the same that is extremely dangerous, and that's what they were missing before. they weren't counting the time difference between there. so if a doctor heard that and everything seemed to be clean, the more exact >
the time measures, the more dangerous it is. so now there's gotta be a time difference between every beat, you're not supposed to see the exact time difference between each pulse beat... they can call that the chaos heartbeat, or heart rate variability, that means the rate >
constantly varies. but if you're counting like a metronome and everythings like bop - bop - bop - just like the second hand, that is extremely dangerous. that means your body is not responding, you know? it must RESPOND. you cannot walk across the street in military march on a >
major highway where traffic is coming.... your tempo is going to start to change. well see, that's what the body expects. the body doesn't expect you to go in training in a very metronomic way. so what makes a person being able to swing, a person not being able to swing? ... >
when you're talking about this thing "swing" man, swing is getting you to move from one point to another point. it's putting LIFE into you. you can't put a dang-dang-a-dang and call that the swing rhythm. swing means, man, when you can feel like hey, I wanna live to the next day.
^ i've never heard someone say something like this that completely nailed my intuition as a drummer vs. what my training taught me. i don't think you'll hear 'rate of change' / 'variability' as a focal point in academies, you can't get it from the 'swing' feature on drum machines
and no amount of micro-shifting within an ableton grid will really suffice. this might be the one factor a forward thinker like Milford Graves got that scores of electronic producers / "beat makers" have no clue about. taking it to heart would blow most people's music wide open
and ultimately once you care much less about staying in time like a drum machine, the more you can focus on texture, emotional color, dynamics, harmonics, phantom beats, and REAL expressiveness, and then you can start creating art rather than paint-by-numbers bullshit. my 2 cents
i've never been able to get that sort of per-beat variability and micro-expressiveness in any way of drum programming i've ever used. the closest i've gotten is with modular stuff that gets loosey goosey with clock timing, and that's awesome but is its own unique & separate thing
and "swing" isn't just a jazz thing or a particular kind of beat - it's central to rhythm and organic life itself. remove it from the equation and you're halfway down the path to fascism and mass graves. i'm not saying that provocatively, i really believe it
