Difficult prog riffs to play

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 Jacob Schoolcraft wrote:

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Fusing precision with simplistic melody is very important as well. Ginger Baker always said that he didn't think about what he was going to play before playing it. Music is about "feel" even when it's complex..

Hi,

This is the hardest part to discuss, even in a place like PA. For most people the music is about the number that it was given within a top ten, a lot more than it is about the music itself. The problem is, that almost all music is in that listing is based on melody, and not anything else, which ought to tell you how important it was, and is, for progressive bands to "let go" of the melody, and the drum beat, in order to be able to free their music ... though we will find that most musicians are afraid of this because they don't "know" where it will go ... heck, if you don't take your walk over there, you will NEVER know! And then, if need be, one can adjust some to make it smoother, and in many ways this is most representative in TFTO, where the excursions within the piece are in many directions, which later RW considered trash, which is a very gross comment, and a total disregard for music making, by saying that it all has to be written out first and then played ... something that an improvisational style and experience, would not allow, and obviously forced RW to stretch his imagination to try and find something to go here and there when he did not know how to fly/flow with it ... to me it shows that he is not a very good improviser at all ... he has to have the notes so he thinks he is in the proper key, etc, etc, etc and my thoughts on this are ... everyone has to listen to him, and he is not gonna listen to anyone else in the band, which often you seem to find in TFTO, even DD commented on it (R. ... what you doing?).

Ginger Baker's comment is something he learned in Africa, although he had some parts of it from his early days, and the fact of the matter was, that he was not afraid to upstage, or derail his fellow musicians, which didn't seem to bother the bass player, but bothered the guitar player a lot ... which ought to tell you who the better experimentalist is, and that is not a knock on Eric, but he is not a good free form player. At least wasn't but in his later years, his "style" has gone back to the "beginning", or at least what I would consider high school/college style, by simply playing it better.

FEEL is not necessarily complex ... it's "origin" might be considered so, and thus its presentation seem weird and off some, but for the person creating it? No problem.

Check out the example I had about the poetry group in the other post on this sequence. "Complexity" is relative to the person creating it, since for them, it's almost natural ... and this you could attribute to many artists in the 20th century that blew out the conventions left and right ... and they were consistent with what they did after ... and you can name a Picasso, a Stravinsky, a Bunuel/Dali and so forth as an example. 

"FEEL" for me is a connection with your mind, and this is difficult if you are an improviser, and Ginger would have said that he had no idea what the feel would be when he started playing, but at that moment in time, this was the feel that came alive, and tomorrow at a different time a different feel would show up ... since it, generally, would be impossible to duplicate the same feeling at another time and place. There certainly could be similarities, but you are not a robot, and thus, your feeling today at 6 is not the same as yesterday at 6.

Based on the poetry example in the other post, my thoughts are that "complex" is RELATIVE and not a sure thing. However, the tough part of this is that it suited one person just right, and no one else could go it as easily, so it seemed. Another example of how good, and well something could be, was Daevid Allen's use of his "glissando" technique. Many folks have tried and done it, and only Steve Hillage has really gotten close to "feeling" it, like Daevid did, but Daevid could turn it on and off at the drop of a dime, and could play it on the show all night long, and he spent time with many students "teaching" this ... and in the end, it was a sort of meditation event a lot more than it was a musical even in our terms, and this is something that is difficult to teach and have everyone copy and do ... so it is "complex" and yet, for Daevid's mind ... it was so simple as for him to be able to have fun with it, and spend time teaching!

 Megistus wrote:

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Sounds like that was the Rickenbacker that has one pickup per stereo side, definitely an interesting concept. Many basses have a split pickup in the neck position, so it would be also be possible to feed the E/A strings to one output and the D/G to another.
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Not sure about this ... since the 4 notes mentioned above are all on one string, and something that the split pickups might not notice. My guess would be there one of the pickups had a split signal that could be manipulated, but I can not quite discuss this as I am not an electronics wizard at all ... but Chris seemed to hav eno issue dong this, but do remember that he had at least one other bass retuned differently and he showed an example where one had the equivalent of two E strings (tune with a different string), which would seem to be the case here, and the rest of the piece played on 3 of the strings other than the 1st one that was tuned down even more.

Wish the person interviewing Chris on that special knew more about these things, because he just sat there and looked star struck when Chris smiling showed him the fun stuff he did, specially the lower notes with double notes used to make an effect ... very unusual and not always found in music theory much, but you think Chris cared about that more than he did about what he sounded like and could do?

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