Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Ostinatoisms

So, there's a couple things I'm digging.
  1. The kind of Pink Floyd ostinato with big chords over the top of it.
  2. The Who kind of lots of fun with virtuoso bass guitar.

So the thing here is that those two things tend to be mutually exclusive because you need the bass to be playing those triplets or whatever with lots of delay. Or, you have the guitar doing that and then all of a sudden I can't play big obnoxious chords or self-indulgent lead lines. And that simply will not do.
Now one advantage of my bass player, Ethan Rosenblatt, is that if anything he tends to underplay. This is a good quality in a musician. We can, however, smack his bum and make him go all Entwhistle on us if we want to. And he's very good at it.
So, if we want the band to go all crazy but want to do it on top of some sort of ostinato then... then the option is obvious.
The Who - like repeated synth playback.
See? Pete Townsend already figured out the solution.
"Sheep" really hit the very bottom (or very top) of where Pink Floyd could go depressing-wise. It brings them back to Meddle-era ostinati and big fun guitar parts (the outtro is really exciting).

So yeah, I've talked about this idea before. It's time to start recording some ostinati.

Now for the big question. Do we use something like Abelton Live for playback? Or do we use QLab? I think we'll end up with QLab because we're going to need it for playing back all the dialog we need to create for the Imaginary Opera.

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