Pisces Drums
Pisces will begin with a soprano saxophone cadenza, what Brian has planned as a type of perpetual-motion texture built on the 16th-note figures found in the melody and accompaniment, using delay or live looping in Ableton. Once this is fully established, Brian will cue me to drop the first beat as he begins his first statement of the melody in full. Brian thought that something light and treble-y would fit the character of the piece. I immediately thought of a beat I had made back in 2005 called “Badasht” (heard on my Dubble8 “Tompkins County Organic” release). Tinkering with this beat in Reason, I gradually replaced about half of the sounds while developing a new pattern in the tempo of Pisces (134 bpm), opting to focus on a triplet division of the beat- in polyrhythm with the 16th divisions of the melody. An ending still needs to be worked out. Here’s what I have so far on the percussion layers:
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