» percussionese

The Snappy Slap Hand Canter

Los Doggies — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:01:23 +0000

It’s hand jiving time―time to break out your 3-lined white gloves, just like the kind Mickey and Mario wear (the kind Hamburger Helper Helping Hand is). Roll over the three hands below from left to right. Try it slow. Try it fast. Try it backwards. To get a canter rolling, you’ll need to make counterclockwise circles.

This classic hand jive beat consists of a snap on each hand (also called a fillip), followed by a clap using the palm and opisthenar (the front and back of the hand). The snaps are a duplet of 16th notes on the up-beat, and the clap is an 8th note on the down-beat. When carnies and other street performers execute this maneuver, the beat is fast and even, like that of a horse canter.

The Snappy Slap Hand Canter is a staple of hambone, juba, and all manner of habile dance. It even has lyrics set to it, “badda bing badda boom”, a phrase borrowed from Percussionese, making the Hand Canter a kind of song; a song that was once an animal drum beat.

Like whistling, hand jiving helps stave off ennui, sublimate our darkest of Biological F’s, and sounds really good too. Check out this scene from Micmacs to hear how a pro performs the Hand Canter.

Hey, horses wrote that song.

Distress Signal Melody

Los Doggies — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:03:13 +0000

When you hear a high G, does it Stress Out your Shit?

The international distress signal melody is a monotonal song in 7/8 time, written in the key of Morse Code, consisting of three quavers, followed by three crotchets, and another three quavers. Normally, the telegrapher is supposed to rest the equivalent note duration in between dits and dahs, but in an especially distressful signal, the beat is kept pulsing at the odd time of seven.

At a radio frequency of 500 kHz, the equivalent tone would be an high G7 (50175.4 Hz), an annoyingly high-pitched tone, and so is transposed down two octaves to a G5 in the widget above.

Here is a 45-second rock cover of “The SOS Song”. It is partly in free time to mimic the distress of a tattooing telegrapher, and features a 7/8 section as rescue efforts get mobilized. The choruses are rendered sailor-style, if not piratically derivative.

Morse code, like written music, is for the most part a dead language. While the commercial use of Morse code is just about obsolete, it is still a very powerful musical language that encodes simple rhythmic patterns into letters (and vice versa), and can be refashioned for much more esoteric forms of communication than relaying the massive bustling missives of business.

Tabla players, African Dummers, and other drumming cultures, speak in Percussionese dialects. However, rock drummers haven’t really much of a rhythmic vocabulary for their beats. We can refer to the style of the beats themselves―up-beat, down-beat, and possibly the African beat that they are based upon―the time signatures and tempos, and that vague quantifier of “feel”. We can speak in specifics―Dave Grohl flams and John Bonham triplets. But what if you were to describe a certain drum fill to someone? You’d be forced to dispense with all symbols, and just sing what it was you meant to say.

No longer friends. Now you can just say “Gimmie the D” in drumorse code.

Epilogue:

The Spring Peepers sing the same tone as the distress signal melody. Could they have provided the inspiration for SOS, in the way that the rhythms of the railways have been said to inspire Jazz beats?

The formula:

Frogs (G) + Railroads (Jazz) = Morse Code

Dah, Dah, Dah, Dit. Here’s some old timey porn.

♪ Little Notes ♪

Los Doggies — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:22:28 +0000

The ictus is the Moment of Music, the vertical dimension, the instant of the beat, the flick of a conductor’s hand.

The flam is an ictus split into two.
Drag over the noteheads to hear a flam of snare drum rimshots.

In Percussionese, the flam is pronounced “Plah!”.

Now try it at home: Exectue a flam on the membranophones of your own body. Take your hands, and use them to hit your left and right calves as if at the same time, but right before the ictus, hit your right first.

Audiences are flammy. Listen to this 4/4 stomp & clap beat from Queen’s “We’ll We’ll Rockya.” Click on the score to PLAY/STOP.

Here’s a snapshot of 3 waveforms all meeting up on the ictus.

The top waveform is a little late, the middle, a little early, and the bottom, a little later than the top. All human music is naturally flammy, as even the tightest drummers are always a split-second early or late. Thus, the ictus is always flammed.

As a musical ornament, the flam concept is conveyed by the appoggiatura – or the added little note that precedes a note in a melody.

The appoggiatura above is a little D note, quickly played before the whole note E.

Appoggiatura’s in Karnov

Check out this melody from the NES game Karnov. Click on the score to PLAY/STOP.

Now, hear this ornamented Karnov with appoggiaturas up the wazoo. These little notes add so much character to the original phrase.

I wish I could speak with appoggiaturas – little grace words preceding what I’m about to say.

As a child, I suffered from glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues”. Later, as a drummer, a new kind of percussalalia would overtake me, that is “speaking in drums”. For as long as I’ve played, the flammy beat below has been on the tip of my mind’s tongue. Like picking at a wound, I love to sound this little beat out again & again. It feels more immediate and readily usable than my human speech.

In Percussionese, it’s pronounced “Plah! Boom! Psaz! Boom! Bloomph! Boom! Ptang!”.

Percussionese

Los Doggies — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:22:08 +0000

Little Richard speaks percussionese – the proto-language of drums.
Check out his impression of a drum fill in Tutti Frutti for your MP3 player.

Drag over the black stemmed noteheads…

Drag over that final “boom” a few more times. Listen to how Little releases that note.
He is very great.

The people of Percussionesia speak a peculiar dialect, characterized by Western ears as “noisy and fast”, consisting of phoneticized rock drums.

In Percussionesian legend, the ancestors were given their language from the thunder god Bhoom-tsit !Plah, during a hundred year storm.

The modern beatbox is a partially reconstructed Percussionese devoid of its original meaning.

Let me show you. Here’s your basic 4/4 rock ‘n’ roll beat.

And here’s the same beat translated into percussionese.

Now you can “speak-a the drums” to your friends. Notice how every word in Percussionese is followed by AN! EXCLAMATION! POINT!