9/8 bongo break

Happiness is realising you've finally written something that you can use that 9/8 drum break on.

Frustration is putting your riff with the bongo break and realising its a different arrangement of the beats in 9/8.

Satisfaction is figuring out that you can hack up the beat to fit your arrangement, in fact it just need to start it a few beats late.

This piece was inspired by the excellent music for the Shalom Aleicham documentary, which I was enjoying throughout, and then delighted to read it was credited to John Zorn, who seems to be able to do anything. I ordered the soundtrack, but before it arrived, came up with this tune; fortunately it had mutated far enough away from the source to be its own thing, yet still be klezmatic in a funny time sig enough to be familiar.

See, when you get into time signatures that are... Differenter, it's not just a case of slopping a funky 4/4 beat over the top to make your song funky. You have to start counting in 2s and 3s.

My track you can count as 2-3-2-2, but the sample (of Turkish karsilama tune 'rampi rampi') counts 2-2-2-3. In other words, mine sounds like 5 and then 4; the drum break is 4 and then 5. So putting one over the other made an absolute cacophony halfway through the measure, as the rhythm started it's second part one beat before the melody.

all it took in the end was swapping round the start and the end (which I also understand was the case for the James Brown 'woo yeah' break). In fact I just trimmed the sample down to the end of one measure and the start of the next, no comping required.

And then I was demoing it in nanostudio, I went and put a drum loop that goes 7-7-4 over that as well, which somehow works.

And then, on top of all of that, I keep playing it wrong. I keep putting in an extra 2 half beats in the middle, turning it into 10/8, with a 7-7-6 rhythm that feels great. Perhaps I could incorporate this mutation somehow. Or just discorporate the whole thing.

Btw my references for this work are Kate Bush's Egypt, and Ozric Tentancles. So I'm aiming for that proggy fusion vibe and seeing this track as a trial of ambition for the KNO album. I intend both to be instrumental, very metal but very thought provoking, and enjoyable on all three levels music matters: the head, the heart and the hips.