So, yesterday, I play an old favorite of my mine, and I instantly think… I could loop this! This could be in my set!
I get home and learn a lot of it. Researching the song, I realize of course…Zappa wasn’t going to let me go that easy…
The song in question is “Watermelons in Easter Hay” Off of Joes Garage Act, III and IV.
If your not familiar its a pretty laid back and easy 4/4 4/5 back to back repeating. I tried it with the BB on straight 4/4 and the beat lines up again every 4 measures but it doesn’t come off with the right feel.
I have the external footswitch…could I change one of the switches to toggle back and 4th between time signatures? Or maybe just pause that beat every 2 measures in 4/4. Hitting both foot swtches to get a cymbal crash as well. Hmmm… any insight deeply appreciated…
I can set my Jam man for 9/4 so the backing track should match up
Update, of I just found 9/4 in Oddtimes, going to play with that…
Ok Update #2. Got it, using Oddtime 7 @ 55bpm. If you want a slow beautiful song to impress people and even yourself with… here ya go. Hat’s off to Frank. Now to figure out how to add in a more lush crash cymbal under my foot.
So Check this out… I got to playing along with the CD version. I found I could almost sync it up at 55 bpm … but I could sync it better if I sat by the BB and twisted the knob around a bit to slightly up the tempo a bit and slow it in other places… I believe this song may have been recorded live, or the drummer was slightly varying temp to give certain sections more of a pulse than other’s. Something like that… Anyways… It gave me an idea for a BB extension pedal… a Volume style foot pedal set to control the tempo. User can set the degree of change. From just a little to a lot. To give live pieces that uber real feel. (not that the BB isn’t already good at that) I can see how this would work for jamming with other musicians live…might be a bit of trouble keeping in sync with the looper pedals unless they were all synced up somehow
Here’s a link to something done by one of the Beat Buddy pedal users: <http://mybeatbuddy.com/forum/index.php?threads/midi-synchronize.1871/#post-7868>
There are other options out there as well that expand the degree of control over midi-capable pedals such as Molten Voltage’s Master Control: <http://moltenvoltage.com/products/MASTER_CONTROL_by_PedalSync_MIDI_PedalBoard_Clock_and_Brain_by_Molten_Voltage.html> and although it doesn’t seem to have any jacks for an expression pedal, it’s a neat concept (albeit much more expensive than Mike Tranch’s option).