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What is this beat thing all about?
Drums. The evil unnecessary evil thing that seems to be necessary nevertheless. You have to have drums, but you can’t get away with just a kick drum repeated throughout with no variation. Or can you.
I’ve seen pictures of drummers, and their drum sets. They have far too many drums in my opinion (because I don’t want to have to worry about why they all exist). What is the proper amount of drums? More than one? Less than one? Four? Six? Something else? Why not have one drum with variable harmonic content. After all, a kick drum is exactly the same sound as a hi hat except for the content. I find I keep putting in too many different drums because they’re all there, and I probably have to or it won’t get taken seriously. Perhaps this is a fallacy. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to use them all.
Also, when do they vary? I understand (or at least I did after the first ten years or so of making electronic music) that you can’t just have a pattern and call it a day and have that one invariant pattern run all day. Should I just put some random fluff wherever to make it sound like the ‘drummer’ made a mistake? One mistake per song? Once each verse and a few times in the chorus? The whole song a big mistake? Who knows, it probably doesn’t matter as much as the harmonic content. It
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Howl
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
(there is more)
Applause @JeffChasteen, any occasion, relevant or irrelevant, is cause to render HOWL once more.
I wonder how many young folk here reading this for the first time will be dumbstruck with awe or will simply scratch their heads and move on. And maybe those headscratchers are right... you had to be there. I doubt the best minds of the current generation will ever be driven to madness, starving hysterical. It was of the time. The societal disjunct was out of control. In today’s western world all is controlled... even the rebellion.
drums , they are tricky..
i keep em super minimal 🤷🏻♂️
i don’t really listen too much fast paced music which seems to get more drum 🥁 sounds / variousness and types..
for me, i like clicks , clacks , kicks and hats.
and non acoustic drum sounds. i’m over acoustic drums in electronic music, they make no sense to me anymore and some people pick the most generic, cheesiest sounds ever...
drums can make or destroy a song with other wise great instrumentation .
just say no to terrible drums
I love synths but for drums, I don’t like synthetic sounding drums. And I feel that drums should support the rest of the song rather than just be a “beat” in their own right. I either use Lumbeat’s apps (Rock Drummer etc) or play in drums by hand to get a feel and to respond to other stuff happening in the track. I know a lot will disagree with at least some of this, but I’ve got to stay true to how I feel. Maybe that’s why I never made the big time!
It is a monumental work.
Glad you enjoy it.
Somewhat off topic: I was watching “No Direction Home” last weekend, and was struck by what a distinctive speaking voice Ginsberg had (pitch, cadence, timbre, etc...) I have heard his voice in interviews and conversations for most of my life, and I am certain that I could pick his voice out of a thousand different voices reading a shopping list during a blindfold test. And, of course, his poetic voice is undoubtedly unique.
@JeffChasteen I doff my hat to you, good sir!
I am not worthy. Well...barely.
I’m pretty basic and like just a kick, snare, hat and maybe a ride occasionally. I have a problem going overboard on percussion though. I delete crashes and claps from any sample packs I get though lol
“What is this beat thing all about?”
Beats me. Drums have their place but not in every piece of music. While I love percussion, I also love music without.
The Circuit has four drum buttons, is that for good reason, or just another Circuit perversity?
Claps are welcomed in, crashes are firmly rejected.
That's a bunch of bull. I understand what claps are for but I still dislike the VAST majority of them. As for crashes, just don't use them every god-damn bar you lazy tribble.
A CRASH IS FOR PUNCTUATION AND EMPHASIS! WOULD YOU YELL OR USE AN EXCLAMATION POINT ON EVERY SENTENCE?!
HAVE A NICE DAY!
I do the same.
Well, I do keep the occasional crash.
@u0421793 : there is no right number of drums. no right combination of drums. No rule that you can blindly follow to make them sound anything better mundane.
If you don’t like drums, if drum parts do nothing for you then skip them. If an instrument doesn’t speak to you at all, you won’t ever be able to tell whether the parts you come up with are crap or gold.
You don’t need them. Stick to what engages you.
@audiblevideo 🤣
Tribalism vs Machine working lanes.
Santana vs Kraftwerk.
Music is repetition and trance, from mantras to amen break.
There is no failure on variation or hypnotic repetition of 808. The deep mind (what Jung calls oonosphere) work with subtle noise (white/brown) and those variations, noises or absence of them induces one or other consciousness state.
Aliveness or dream.
Drum sets the root chakra with kick, third eye with snare and crown with hats (it’s more complicated of course).
Think in Apache song and drums.
Think in buddhist gong and bowls.
Think in African chants and dances.
Find your connection to rhythm
of life.
Feel your heart
beat.
one of the best things to ever happen on seinfeld
Three drums should be the minimum. Low frequency, high frequency, and something in-between.
As a drummer, I find a lot of electronic pieces to be rhythmically boring. If you don't have at least one 2 vs 3 going on, it hardly even counts.
drums do not exist
Drumbo
After all, a kick drum is exactly the same sound as a hi hat except for the content.
By that token all your sentences are the same except for the content...
These guys had two drums and one cymbal initially.
Modern musical production techniques allow you to play all the instruments a multi player band used to play by yourself. That doesn't automatically make you good at all those roles.
Why don't you find a drummer, or a drum programmer, and collaborate with them? You don't have to like each other - in fact not getting on often makes for more interesting music.
Yes, but it didn’t say that in the advert for the device, nor in the instruction manual. I think in the interests of fairness, these instruments should have a small label “warning: you‘re probably going to be crap at some of this”
I’ve recently thought of outsourcing this sort of thing. I’ve never found it easy (well, even possible) to find other people to make contact with for any purpose at all, and inevitably do the whole of anything I do myself. Now I’m wondering if I should use the equivalents of fiverr and the like to have someone somewhere perform the parts of the art I start, and of course contractually sign their rights of ownership and authorship over to me so that I still own the whole work.
It’d be like the thing I always used to posit with photography. If I go up to a person in (for eg) Trafalgar Square where there are many tourists taking photos, and also many normal people too, and I hand someone a camera (as often occurs) to take a picture, except that I don’t want them to take a picture of me, I instead direct them to take a picture of that scene over there, is that their photo or my photo?
But back to the case in point.
One extreme is a repetitive bass drum beat, no variation, just boom boom boom all the way through.
The other extreme is use everything in the drum set, and make sure each bar sounds different to any prior bar, keeping things max original.
The latter would probably be baffling and cognitive overloady. It might not even represent music, but let’s ignore that for a while and call it experimental. The former is as people have mentioned, boring, trance-like and slides out of the realm of attention. Then, the point has been mentioned, the drummer might get bored and introduce a mistake now and then (or an intentional variation, if they’re very experienced with that sort of mistake). What I’m intrigued with is whenever one of these fluffs, variations or intentional disturbances in the monotony occur, do they occur with the consensus of everyone – the rest of the band, the listener, the cultural shape of the way things are?
Interesting. It's quite the opposite for me.
Although I'm a keyboard player, somehow I always enjoyed writing bass and drum tracks more.
My recommendation if you aren't into writing drum grooves:
Gadget > Stockholm > Load live drum or breakbeat REX files.
Authentic, easy, flexible, editable.
For me there is only one... (c’mon... you knew this would show up! 😂)
About beats and Ginsberg’s Howl ... weren’t bongos the go-to percussion in that group? 😄
Seriously though, a modular synth backing track for that poem might be fit the bill. Wouldn’t surprise me if one’s been made already.