The Junto exercise this week is a graphic score by Lark Pien:
Record a short piece of music interpreting the illustration as a graphic score.
The reference to a waltz led me to think of a 3/4 time signature, a feel I thought I'd been playing on the drums the day earlier. I posted saying this on the forum.
Then I had a few ideas about how I could approach this Junto, including one where I'd aim to the visually approximate the design. However, as I'd already said I was thinking of 3/4 drums I felt obligated.
It's funny because I've been listening to the 'Cognitive Bias Song' recently. I'm not sure whether this is a consistency bias but I'd like to call it a continuity bias, since I'll post on the forum with my song and want to reflect my earlier decision.
Anyway, I ended up recording the 3/4 drums. The comment by Daniel Diaz about "click based techno music overdose" got me thinking I should record without a click track. So you'll notice I'm playing drums without headphones in this video.
I recorded the drums on Friday afternoon without an idea how I was going to use them. It occurred to me that it'd be good to contrast the 3/4 against 4/4 but in the end I think it's a 12/8 time signature. There was about seven minutes of drumming and I quickly edited together the bits I liked.
This week I bought a Kala U-bass on a whim and it arrived on Friday. You can see a U-bass in the video above, which also features the talented James Hill. I'd already decided to record a single-take bass part to compensate for editing the drums or something, but it took a little while before I was sure I wanted to record on this new and small instrument. It sounds huge and only took a little while to grow accustomed to the shorter scale frets.
On Saturday morning I recorded the bass part and it's the second take. I was wondering how to represent the gestures in Pien's drawing when I remembered my theremin. It was last used through the Ravish sitar effect for Junto 0134.
You can see on the left-hand of the video (top) that I am rotating and making a series of gestures. These are meant to reflect those shown in the drawing. I think I went through the sequence twice over the course of the recording.
