Keyboardklutz,

Could you address the differences between your synaesthesis and the website we've been referred to. The major differences would be ....(?)

Keyboardklutz said: "Synaesthesis' site has been posted before in another forum. Their definition of synaesthesis is quite bogus and the scholarship on the site very weak to non-existent."

How would I find the previous topic - search on "synaesthesis" in PWF? Was that recently?

Thanks,

Betty

Multiple inaccuracies and phrasing lines independently are not the same thing. Haven't you all noticed the sublime quality of having independent lines a few milliseconds out of sync with each other? It gives the lines a human quality as opposed to a machine like quantization. It was what Glen Gould strived for in the fugues. In jazz laying back the melody behind the bass line is a well known neccesity, play them in perfect sync and the feeling is boring. Common practice is for the bass to play in front of the pulse, the druums on the pulse, and the melody or solist behind the pulse. Each player plays in and maintains a seperate "pocket". We are talking in terms of milliseconds.

It was a joke

Betty, in case you didn't find it it's here: http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/topic/2/15439/5.html#000108

By the way... more seriously...
I agree, of course that precisely locked timing is usually boring, and hence the introduction of so called "human feel" on some of the early drum machines.. (I think it was a Roland term?)
I also agree that relative pushing or laying back on the beat of different parts contributes subtly to the feel of jazz (and other music).
However there is an important but simple physical fact; sound travels quite slowly. Say the backline in a band set up is 10 feet behind the brass/vocals/PA. The speed of sound is around 1100 fps so this separation will produce a delay of around 9 milliseconds from the audience point of view. Thus, having the bass a little ahead of the pulse helps synchronise the overall sound; laying back the melody a little also contributes to this. Things get complicated if the backline is hearing the rest of the band through the frontline monitors (common in smaller set ups), as they will be hearing it with a similar delay. One can see (I should say "hear")the value of sophisticated foldback!
Of course, this is why in small line ups where everyone can hear the drums they need to be fairly central; all the players then hear them at about the same time.
And all this is without the psychoacoustic impact of natural and manufactured reverb!! Time to stop before I bore myself........ and you!

As long as humans are involved in sound production, perfectly synchronized time will not be a possibility, even from one beat to the next. Computers are capable of quantized time, humans aren't, not even for short durations.

This became apparent to me decades ago in a studio that had just gone digital.

I had played a 100 note stretch at the rate of about 20 notes per second (much like the opening of my youtube video signature) and the engineer remarked that now "anybody" could play that fast by using the computer.

He played back my stretch and I saw it mapped on a computer screen. I couldn't believe how totally innacurate it was when referenced to strict, quantized, metronomic time.

What I thought was perfect partitioning of notes of equal duration was anything but that when graphically studied on the screen and played back super slow!

And we're talking about someone here that Lennie Tristano, a great "time-sensitive" musician, said had a great sense of time.

The engineer also let me hear what my stretch sounded like with each note equalized (quantized), the attack point and duration of each note brought into perfect equality and it sounded nothing like what I had played. Not specifically what I would call machine-like, but just not musical whatsoever. Just a succession of notes that may as well have been unconnected!

Not sure I understand your question entirely, so I'll give it a shot.

There is "Jazz Chord Hanon" out by a guy named "Peter Deneff" from California who is a Jazz teacher. These exercises are great sight reading as they have 4 note chords in the right hand and single notes in the left.

Also, he has "Samba Hanon" which I rather like, cause I just like playing the Latin music.

He has Blues Hanon, and oh my, don't open your eyes and look at this book! This book may be a bit much!

I know you asked for something free, but if you can't find anything free online, take a look at these books. Should keep youy busy for awhile. Have fun! Hope this helps some!

Perhaps jazz players with sight reading problems should practice sight reading in the Real Book since that is the standard repetoire, rather than some method book. If the Real Book is too difficult then go with the Faber adult method books which start simple and then get a little more difficult gradualy.

Rintin, Betty and Disciple:

You've helped clarify the path for improving my sightreading. I've made some good progress in the basics and am somewhere near the transition to the more fluent idea-flow level.

I like your way of describing the mental processes, Disciple. It's the kind of advice I have a hard time finding and for the most part just experiment with different ways of thinking music. Also your enthusiasm is motivating.

I'll be printing off some posts... Tomorrow when I'm not falling asleep

I think we in are in complete agreement here, Disciple. I can't remember when I first played a simple line onto a midi track and saw it transcribed into sheet music unquantised[/b]; but I do remember what it looked like - it was totally unreadable, myriads of 16th, 32nd, 64th notes and rests (and though it may have not been great playing - it wasn't that bad ). Turning it into something that looked like a normal printed music took a very heavy dose of quantisation and even then it needed a lot of tedious editing. It proved the principle that printed music can only ever be a guide to a performance.
As you say no human can play with total precision. I am curious as to how accurately someone can[/b] play. For example you clearly have a very well developed accurate technique. I wonder, if you sought to play a series of equal notes, what would be the average error? We would then know that greater variation in timing was not due to inaccuracy but to deliberate, albeit possible unconscious, musicality. I am sure someone has done this before.. anybody know?????

You're 100% correct. It would actually be unnatural[/b] for me if I were to force playing in a perfectly quantized manner. It would take a conscious effort to play in a totally synchronized manner which would be directly oppose the way I hear individual note production within phrases.

The Tristano "school of jazz" stresses extreme individualization of individual notes and cells within phrases, each note being of significant importance, not just a "go-to" to get from one end of the phrase to the other.

No matter how quickly the notes are played in succession, each one has its own spin with a parameter that sets it apart from the one surrounding it.

Because of this, deliberate metric swing, or shuffle, is unnecessary to create dramatic propulsion, which is why the music sounds "cooler" (cool-school) than the jazz norm of pushing tied eighth note trips (the "jazz" eighths played like triplet eighths with the first two notes tied, even though written as straight eighths).

Internote dynamics are one way to acheive this.

Where most jazz players will swing by rhythmically[/b] playing a phrase as:

Daaa-Da, Daaa-Da, Daaa-Da, Daaa-Da... etc.

but with all other parameters of production being static, "cool-school" players can impart a swingless swing by imparting the following dynamic profile (on a scale of 1-10) to those notes:

5-5-10-5-1-5-1-10-5-1-1-5-10-5-1-10-5-, etc.

Now, what that did was very interesting. It created 3 different phrasing sub-groups within the same phrase. Notes that pop out at you dynamically from within the phrase.

Keep in mind that the same way Tristano school musicians individualized the dynamics note to note, we also were taught that each note should have an entire life of it's own to maximize instant creation.

Not only it's own dynamic, but it's own metric quantized or unquantized placement, it's own ASDR (attack envelope = attack, decay, sustain, release), or duration within that quantized ot unquantized space.

Using this type of mindset, you can play the same 10 note phrase over and over and never repeat it exactly the same way twice! Control over the parameter of each note is of equal importance!

And think about it. Isn't this what the greatest singers do? Lennie felt that pianists should strive to develop the same amount of control over note production as "breathing" musicians (wind players and singers). This is why singing/scatting[/b] with melodies and solos is so very important, not just to duplicate the notes, but to duplicate every phrasing nuance of the dialect one is filling their musical psyche with.

Here's an example of this type of playing by Lennie's two most famous students, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, Warne being the consummate master of "cool-school's" swingless swing:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GE_Tjcphzuo

Here, on track 1 and 4 is Lennie himself:

http://www.amazon.com/Lennie-Tristano-Ne...00759579&sr=8-1