spinning drum blog

I am not a lucky person. I am blessed, but not lucky; those are two different things. And the truth be told I prefer the latter. I mean who needs easy prizes when you have been been granted the clarity of vision to see what you have to be grateful for and the openness of heart to embrace it.

Every morning I do a bit of a gratitude dance and count at least five thing I have to be grateful for. It circulates between such things as thank you for my health and the health of friends and family to thank you for my fabulous cats or beautiful home. I have an especially big gratitude for finding an instrument of which I have a life time to discover and an eternal sense of wonder for. And I am grateful for this passion that fuels the expansive nature of my pursuits and wets my appetite for the gifts each person has to offer.

So my mother told me the other day she didn’t understand my blog – the lingo really. All the turntable talk and whatnot went, not surprisingly, right over her head, or perhaps really never left the page. While I didn’t expect her to always get what I was saying, I had hoped that some of it would make sense.

I’m pretty used to being misunderstood or only partially understood at the most. I’m comfortable with that. After all, I’ve dedicated myself to a nascent musical instrument that few people understand and even fewer appreciate. But to make up for my mother’s lack of clarity, partially due to my own lack of same, I’ve decided it’s a good time to review that concept. The turntable is a musical instrument.

Beats measures, timing, melodies all spun and scratched out on black wax. Still in its infancy, as is every scratch musician’s skill level, the turntable, nonetheless, is teaching us something about the nature of music itself. It is shifting our perspective as well as pitch, and it is giving our traditional ideas about musicianship a bit of a remix.

To a large part we have dub creator King Tubby to thank. Working as a vinyl cutter for Treasure Isle records, sound engineer Tubby was one of the first to pioneer the art of the “remix.” Taking the lyrics out of popular songs and applying lots of audio effects and a pronounced beat and bassline, the father of the b-side, Tubby was the first to rework Jamaican hits for the Kingston dancefloor. The Jamaican sound later spawned the now popular global genre of dub music.

Today, what the advent of the remix is helping us understand is that the possible recombinations of rhythm and sound are truly endless. Both beat juggling and scratching are based on this fundamental truth. Juggling and recombining beats or simply scratching a sound, one becomes aware that there are sounds within sounds. Rhythmically achieved through a combination of tempo changes, pressure on vinyl and fader action, the marriage of these actions and aspects through turntable “playing” allows any sound to be musically manipulated. Creating percusion patterns and melodies out of a fraction of a hiss cut in black wax, endless songs can be created from a combination and recombination of any sonic vibrations. In the fine words of Mix Master Mike commenting on the art of scratching, “If you’ve just got air between sounds on a record, you take that air and fuck it up.”

I told my roommate the other day that one of my main concerns was that the turntable survive in its full glory into the next century. I truly hoped the turntable would enter the new millenia as a fully recognized musical instrument and the potential of the spinning drum revealed. Not that it was more important than the end of famine or a cure for cancer or whateverelse one may dedicate her life to, but simply that to me it was the most wonderous cultural artifact that was also a crucial piece of our musical evolution.