As we continue to flesh out the video content for Play With Your Music, I put together this series on rhythm.
The first video takes you through the basics of counting in 4/4 time, along with some different visualizations. Alex gently chided me for starting with the traditional rhythmic atoms of whole notes, half notes and quarter notes, which is not the Bamberger-approved method of starting with structural simples. But I figure if I’m going to throw around vocabulary, I might as well define it in advance. Though as I’m typing this, it occurs to me that it might be better to present one of the beats first, and then use it to break down the terminology. I guess I’ll fix it at the next video shoot.
The second video talks through some of the drum patterns included in my thesis. I didn’t intend to have the speaker graphic obscure the middle of all the circular drum patterns, but I had some cross-platform Powerpoint issues. Again, it’s something to fix on a future shoot.
The third video is a very concise version of this blog post about swing. As you can see, I’m still ironing out technical bugs. The audio from the computer is ever so slightly ahead of the audio from my mic, which makes it look like I can’t keep time as I’m counting or beatboxing along with the music. We also have a ways to go on evening out the mix between my talking and the music level. Powerpoint is a blunt instrument for audio. But I’m excited to keep the series going, probably with some more in-depth looks at son clave and the Funky Drummer.