have you ever picked up a tamborine?
actually, if you have one nearby... pick it up.

that shit looks easy to play, doesn't it.

but i bet you can't make it sound like
ol' boy made it sound on "where did our love go?"


i was looking at the "standing in the shadows of motown" documentary last night... and i just realized that george clinton was right.

he said that motown and p-funk were similar,
in the sense that you had a handful of songwriters
giving songs to one bad ass band, and then
swapping out the lead singers.



this also made me realize why motown covers
never really worked. i mean, if michael mcdonald
was singing w/ the funk bros. playing behind him,
then those motown covers would work just fine.


but he doesn't have the funk bros. playing behind him soooo....




but back to the tamborine.
how. the fuck. did he get the tamborine to sound like that?

it looks so easy, doesn't it?

>but back to the tamborine.
>how. the fuck. did he get the tamborine to sound like that?

</entendre>
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

you can basically throw the cuica (lol @ that instrument) and most other percussion instruments in this bag.

>this also made me realize why motown covers
>never really worked. i mean, if michael mcdonald
>was singing w/ the funk bros. playing behind him,
>then those motown covers would work just fine.
>
>
>but he doesn't have the funk bros. playing behind him
>soooo....

in my reviews of those albums, I always listed the production as a fault. one song, I believe it was Stevie Wonder's "All In Love Is Fair", really ticked me off with the "faux rap" pastiche on the drums. so unnecessary. you can sound current without falling into gimmicky traps... Mike himself did this in the 1970s w/the Doobies redoing Holland/Dozier/Holland standards.

People sleep on how hard it is to properly play the tambourine with soul

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

>People sleep on how hard it is to properly play the
>tambourine with soul


she was always nice w/ it on the tamborine.

i could always tell when it was her that was playing it
w/o even looking lol.

doesn't make it any less true though


*Joe's post, not a separate post about how hard it is to play a tambourine well... which would be an interesting post. At least to me.

-------
so I'm in a band now:
album ---> http://greenwoodburns.bandcamp.com/releases
Soundcloud ---> http://soundcloud.com/greenwood-burns

my own stuff -->http://soundcloud.com/lonesomedstringband

avy by buckshot_defunct

Didn't bring it up so as not to make Joe's post about me and my said-it-all-beforeness though lol

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where we tried to pretend that bands didn't matter in r&b and soul. I let it slide because it helped push another agenda but c'mon yall... look at these cats and you know they were integral. look at the memphis sound aretha got and the band was integral. stax's sound... all the way around. And its the little subtlties like tamborine play which just can't be appreciated enough. Try and find a kid today that's gonna be the tamborine guy who's name nobody knows but holds all the tracks together. I'll wait....
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

studio bands were important, sure.

but by and large the R&B audience wasn't checking for bands as featured acts. they were into solo acts and singing groups for the most part.

don't be brand new.

fuck you.

but i thought the focus was on the sound of R&B not the selling power. I mean nobody was going hard at bands, but it was brushed off so easily I couldn't help but o_O!!
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

sorry, dog.

fuck you.

there are a lot of reasons that
we don't have any great bands anymore...
(bands like the funk bros, p-funk, EWF, or whoever you want to insert)


but i think the BIGGEST reason we don't have them anymore
is b/c there is no scene that can nurture the talent.

you have to understand... the funk brother and all of the rest of the session musicans were jazz players.

they came from an era when you could just go down the street
and jam w/ some of the best jazz player in the business.


i was reading the miles davis autobiography, and he was saying
that the area he started playing at had dive spots on every corner,
and you could go and listen to/ play with some of the greatest players of all time.


i mean, we don't have those types of spots anymore.
so where are these musicians going to grow?
where will their genius be developed?




i think that's why you don't see the bands the way we used to.
that's why we can't have another parliament-funkadelic.

because wehre are you going to find a band
that has experience with creating doo-wop harmonies?
AND has the experience of creating a james brown rhythm section?
AND has the experience of a classicaly trained pianist like bernie worrell?
AND has experience just jamming w/ a jazz band down the corner?



i mean, it's just not possible.

wasn't maurice white a session drummer for stax?
look at the talent he was exposed to before
he went on to create EWF.



the closest thing black folks had to that kind of exposore to talent
was when hip hop was starting, and you had
folks all rapping and DJing the same clubs/ parties
together before it became big.


but what kind of scene is there nowadays
to support that kind of talent?



i'm sure it will pop up again,
but it won't be like it was.



so i think that's what folks are talking about
when they mention the "decline" in black music.

i'm sure folks that dug jazz felt the same way
when the jazz scene dried up.




but i believe everything comes back around.
there will be a scene that will pop up
and make music "great" again.

hell, for all i know... it's already out there.
it's just in some kind of new context that makes it hard
for me to recognize it for what it is.






>where we tried to pretend that bands didn't matter in r&b and
>soul. I let it slide because it helped push another agenda
>but c'mon yall... look at these cats and you know they were
>integral. look at the memphis sound aretha got and the band
>was integral. stax's sound... all the way around. And its
>the little subtlties like tamborine play which just can't be
>appreciated enough. Try and find a kid today that's gonna be
>the tamborine guy who's name nobody knows but holds all the
>tracks together. I'll wait....
>________
>Big PEMFin H & z's
>█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
>http://concretesoundsystem.com
>Mo'Nium - http://monium.tumblr.com/
>
>"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

was all of the nods to the fact that it was about mastering your instrument and how competition played into all of that. That scene in the alley. The one in the club. When Muddy and Howling Wolf meet. In all those cases it's about being strong with your instrument, confident to go up against the next man, confident you can fit in whatever the situation calls for.

There's the quote from Miles I think "you can tell a musician by how they hold their instrument." Still rings true, cats just stopped holding instruments (follow that to its logical conclusion).

Worth saying is that the hip-hop cipher kind of replaced the dive spot for players. And at its height played a similar role in developing ones talent. Unfortunately that too has gone to the wayside.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

>was all of the nods to the fact that it was about mastering
>your instrument and how competition played into all of that.


miles davis said that he was in a place
and the drummer kept fucking up.

he was playing too much.
he couldn't swing.
he just sucked in general, i guess.

this drummer was sitting in w/ some musicians
that he had no business sitting in with.



so anyway, they kept telling him
to "stop playing so much"
and to "listen." but this drummer wasn't hearing it.
he kept fucking up...
















so somebody threw a cymbal at him.




*blink*



i just...
i mean...
really...?



i can't deal w/ that kind of pressure. lol
jazz musicans are crazy.

and I agree... one of the only places I really see a real social component to playing music (besides the Internet but that's its own ball of wax) is the church... and small artsy pockets of cities fortunate to have them.

given that a lot of that is winding down due to decreased membership for which ever reason... I feel like a lot of musicianship is being "funneled" nowadays.

I wish I could have more strongly tied jazz music to the trends we saw in the 60s-80s in that post. I really believe that's why I love that music so much... even though it wasn't jazz, there was a lot of "jazz" in what I heard, particularly from the sophistication side of things.

conversely there are some Chick Corea records (recorded apart from RTF) where I think he goes lightweight "R&B" with some of his chord choices.

>I wish I could have more strongly tied jazz music to the
>trends we saw in the 60s-80s in that post. I really believe
>that's why I love that music so much... even though it wasn't
>jazz, there was a lot of "jazz" in what I heard, particularly
>from the sophistication side of things.
>



quincy jones described MJ's "baby be mine" as a
bebop record.

i was like, "huh?"

but then i listened to it again.
he said that synthesizer line
is something that you'd hear from charlie parker or something.


i mean shit, jimmy jam and terry lewis had
janet singing "the body that loves you" w/ harmonies
that sounded like she was trying to sing over top of a jazz band.

i think all of my favorite musicians have
some kind of jazz leaning, and it comes through
in unexpected places.


you can hear the jazz shit running all through motown,
all through stevie's stuff,
all through "off the wall"
all through chaka's material.

it's all over the place.



>conversely there are some Chick Corea records (recorded apart
>from RTF) where I think he goes lightweight "R&B" with some of
>his chord choices.

no tamborine? not a Motown record.

of all the Funk Brothers, i was most excited to see the tamborine man (whose name i promptly forgot, of course). LOL

fuck you.

>of all the Funk Brothers, i was most excited to see the
>tamborine man (whose name i promptly forgot, of course). LOL

Jack Ashford: http://www.jackashford.com/

But I feel you on the "No tambourine, no Motown" tip... That's how I was able to tell that songs like "Build Me Up Buttercup" that on the outside sounded like Motown were really facsimiles.

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i didn't notice tamborine on her records.

fuck you.

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

>But I feel you on the "No tambourine, no Motown" tip... That's
>how I was able to tell that songs like "Build Me Up Buttercup"
>that on the outside sounded like Motown were really
>facsimiles.



yep.
"build me up buttercup" came on my iPod the other day,
and i was like, you can tell they were going for the motown sound on this one.

but there is no tamborine.
and the snare sounds wrong, too.



do you reallize i sat at my friends drum set,
just hitting the snare drum in diffent ways... trying to make it sound like a "motown snare."


i've never heard anybody that
made it sound quite right.
and i KNOW folks were trying.

was they got the drums all wrong. I blame technology. It's really hard to do the way we're recording things today.
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"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

most of these throwback albums just don't have them.

the hooks just aren't catchy enough.

motown songs had hooks for days.

drum fills used as hooks.
(think about the drum that starts out "ain't too proud to beg.")

guitar lines uses as hooks.
(cloud nine)

piano licks as hooks
("where did our love go.")

the chourses were hooks.
(pick one from the motown antholgy)

hooks. hooks. hooks.




the throwback albums
don't have those kinds of hooks.
yeah, you notice the snares aren't popping like the
motown snares...

but amy whinehouse showed you with "back in black"
that you can have a great album that has a throwback sound
even if the band doesn't sound quite the same.


the problem isn't the "production."
the problem is the hooks.




not that i blame them.
i've tried to write hooks before.
it's hard.

my test is that if i play it for somebody,
and it's gets stuck in their head for a few days.

i've only written one hook that was catchy in that way,
and it's not for lack of trying.


but yeah, it ain't the way that the drums sounds that's the problem.
it's what they're playing.


not enough hooks
on most throwback albums.


>was they got the drums all wrong. I blame technology. It's
>really hard to do the way we're recording things today.
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>
>"When the music stops he falls back into this abyss."

>yep.
>"build me up buttercup" came on my iPod the other day,
>and i was like, you can tell they were going for the motown
>sound on this one.
>
>but there is no tamborine.
>and the snare sounds wrong, too.

Apart from the more obvious omissions and the fact that their vocalists tended to sing as if they had only a tentative grasp of the English language, if you listen to enough Foundations records you realize that they all usually have a rhythmic Motown-ish intro and *maybe* a Motown chorus but the verses are pure pre-blues English pop from Denmark St. In fact, there's usually a weird discontinuity between the chorus and the verse where the time signature changes to accomodate the shift from a rhythmic approach to a sappy melodic one.

"Baby Now That I'e Found You" http://youtu.be/NuHhLiRkxNM

"Back on My Feet Again" http://youtu.be/HTikzTYzQRQ

But that's a different discussion altogether...

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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

It's also why I always felt Motown artists made the best Christmas records. Something about the sound of that funky tambourine reminds me of Jingle Bells, reindeer, and Christmas all together.

what is going on w/ the tom drums
on al green records?

do you know what i'm talking about?

i've sat at drum set
trying to make a tom drum sound like that.

it just doesn't work. lol

I love how tambourine can effectively be used as the entire drum section by accomplished players.

There's a strong tradition of dominant tambourine play in a few different antecedents of rnb, like gospel-blues and early roadhouse blues (both for lack of a better term).

Eddie Head & His Family: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU7MMMWY_HE

and a personal favorite I've put up on here quite a few times, the Mississippi Jook band's 'Barbecue Bust': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pegm79r1zE

But really, American styles of play pretty much pale before Brazilian pandeiro masters. My first introduction to someone playing live was Marcos Suzano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEbKk8Qxe-o

and for what a guy like that can add to a rock band, check this out - a live version of a track from one of my favorite albums: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug2rZuXvXkA

-------
so I'm in a band now:
album ---> http://greenwoodburns.bandcamp.com/releases
Soundcloud ---> http://soundcloud.com/greenwood-burns

my own stuff -->http://soundcloud.com/lonesomedstringband

avy by buckshot_defunct

>
>and a personal favorite I've put up on here quite a few times,
>the Mississippi Jook band's 'Barbecue Bust':
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pegm79r1zE

that doesn't sound like something I would have expected to be released in 1936.
it sounds WAY ahead of its time.

or maybe I just don't know enough about music from 1936.

either way, that was dope.
sounds like those New Orleans bands to me. like the stuff they play at the parades.




>
>But really, American styles of play pretty much pale before
>Brazilian pandeiro masters. My first introduction to someone
>playing live was Marcos Suzano:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEbKk8Qxe-o
>

impressive.




>and for what a guy like that can add to a rock band, check
>this out - a live version of a track from one of my favorite
>albums: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug2rZuXvXkA



jaw on floor. I don't even know what they're saying.
but that's dope.