audio: Tango Combinado
Another ninjam mixdown for your listening pleasure
Direct download link [48MB MP3]
Recorded Sept. 10 2008. No edits, just mixdown of what we all played live, with compression, eq, and reverb added to make things cohesive, and put the right instrument in the foreground as best i could.
the group:
me: keyboard sounds (everything but piano)
slickback: drum kit
tbfx: guitar
rAzzeL: piano
This opens with a gorgeous piano intro by rAzzeL. I join in shortly on (fake) Rhodes, and I’ve got the pianos panned opposite each other (they go back to center once the groove starts). We set up a sort of tango feel before slickback enters on drums just before 4 minutes in. Things groove along until about 6 minutes in when I switch to playing a bass line on a minimoog emulation. rAzzeL then begins a solo with really interesting and sophisticated phrasing. slick drops down to a more sparse feel to allow this to build.
tbfx enters about 10:30 with a clean guitar line that’s very melodic and restrained. I start to put more accents into the bass line to drive things a bit, which causes the rest of the band to start picking the energy level up as well. Around 13:30, tbfx throws some distortion on and develops that melody line quietly but powerfully. By about 15:00 it really begins to rock, and I move toward more a funky bass line. Wew don’t lose the melodic nature of this though, thanks to the longer tones held by tbfx. But it shifts up a gear at 16:30 when he throws a more crunchy tone in and starts to tear it up some.
By 18:20 rAzzeL has taken the baton back and starts to develop a piano solo. The feel drops back to a half time groove allowing him to develop. At 19:15 I pick up the Rhodes substitute for a solo, leaving the bass line looping in the background. The drums really get pounding behind me as slick works the toms. As I push things more toward funk, some crazy rhythm guitar comes up behind me, which makes me want to reach for a couple more layers and thicken things up. By 22:15 things are cooking pretty good, so I play a rhythmic figure on (fake) clavinet and loop it to put more motion into the groove, establishing some 16th note syncopation. At about 23:00 the drums come roaring back in behind that with a full sound and a lot of snare accents. tbfx steps back up and wails at 23:30 with a driving rock feel.
At 25:00 when he drops down to rhythm guitar picking, I grab a sine wave patch on the minimoog and see how far I can push the energy level. I work the pitch bend wheel quite a bit as I like to do with these mono lead patches. rAzzeL brings up some pad sounds behind me as it builds toward a climax. A breakdown at 27:15 sets up the reentry of drums at top gear. I then go all out for the big ending. (I couldn’t edit this into a full break since I was sending ninjam a mix of three channels–I can’t unmix them later.) So I proceed to go all out for the next two minutes. Everyone does a great job of keeping things burning behind me. I wind up at 29:44 and things just gradually decompress after that.
This is one of my favorite ninjam sessions, because it goes places. Nobody said “hey, lets do a tango!” or “change it up now,” it just happened to grow out of us listening to each other. And every time the groove changes, it’s the same–just a change of feel caused by the players listening to each other. This is how it’s supposed to work.
