The Rhythm Of (Beat) One

I don't know that this will make sense until I start posting some audio/video of me performing some of my new songs (or older songs with new arrangements) but lately I have been really trying to get my head, musically, around the idea of ultra minimalist percussion as a way to control a song's momentum.

Like so many others, in recent years I've been quite taken with Mumford and Sons, and particularly Marcus's way of controlling a song with just a bass drum and occasionally some additional tambourine.   It's not that he's doing anything that has not been done before musically, but his execution is quite another story.

He's fronting the band, playing guitar, and ALSO playing these percussion parts with his feet.  The songs are amazing, but as a musician there is also an entire other level of brilliance to behold. And I have found that his take on percussion to control momentum has really been influencing me.

The trouble is that - and here is where the audio/video are kinda needed to make sense of things - my performance rig doesn't allow me quit the same level of rhythmic flexibility as Marcus.  I'm creating many layers all at once, but I;m not looping anything, and so, quite frankly, my feet are already rather occupied with other tasks most of the time to make all the layers happen.  FYI, in simplest terms, I ma playing the main riff on guitar, with a bass line, with some percussion, with some strings underneath if I want, with a solo line on either the guitar and/or a piano, all at the same time.  No looping. Yes, I know that sounds absurd, but that's my rig.  Really.  Yeah, I'll post video soon.

In any case, at this point, my ability to play the rig means that I cannot create too elaborate percussion lines.  Lots of 4-on-the-floor kinda things right now.  But I also have been finding that I need some kind of percussion variations beyond just playing or not to make the songs really work.

Enter the 1/8 note.  Such a simple and easily accessible variation, but yet I could not see it for a long time.  Could not hear it in context.  Yet now there is a great sense of variation in momentum at my disposal.

I know this all has made little or no sense, and I know that I need to post video of the rig in action for that to be resolved, but I have just bee so overcome by the simple musical elegance of this that I wanted to quickly post something.  Much more coming very soon....