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PERCUSSION
GET CREATIVE! | Mark Shelton
The Creator of the universe placed creativity
within mankind and God expects us to use this
amazing gift. Are you exercising your creative
musical skills? Do you have a growth plan? The
following music creation projects are designed
to challenge and sharpen your improvisation
and composition prowess.
GENERATE
If you are new to creating personal music, you
might wonder how to get the initial material
that you can develop further. One method is
to simply improvise. If you've allowed yourself
to make up music in the moment, you are an
improviser.
Take the freedom and fun of improvisation into
your practice session. Experiment with different
time signatures, make up melodies built on
exotic scales, create a polyrhythmic pattern,
play outside of metric restrictions, or you can
improvise within your comfort zone. Just get
your autoschediasm going!
Pay attention to your noodling and when one of
your spontaneous snippets of sound strikes you
favorably, STOP! Try to recreate it immediately.
When the musical tidbit can be played to your
liking, capture the brilliant fragment by notation
or on an audio recording. As you continue to
collect musical gems from your improvisations,
you will accumulate a lick library with material
for potential development.
Now that you're generating original musical
ideas, it's time to move further with these next
creative exercises.
CREATE A GROOVE
As a percussionist, you’re probably experienced
with weaving your parts into the rhythmic ideas
of your groove colleagues. Armed with that
background, try creating a multi-part groove. If
all the parts suddenly pop into your brain at the
same time, that’s a blessing and a time-saver. If
that doesn’t always happen, here’s an exercise
to guide you:
1. Decide on the number of parts for your
groove. (You can add or delete during the
process.) My example contains four parts.
2. Compose or choose a main skeletal
rhythm—maybe one from your lick library.
My example main skeletal rhythm is
notated in Figure 1. The skeletal rhythm is
split between two parts in Figure 2.
3. Experiment to add other parts to
complement the skeletal rhythm. See
Figure 3. If you have access to a sequencer,
you can enter the parts to hear how the
rhythms interact. Keezy Drummer is a
simple sequencer app that I use.
4. Once you are satisfied with how the
rhythms interact, assign the parts to
various timbres. Consider spreading
the parts across a broad spectrum of
frequencies and/or contrasting timbres.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
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112 July 2020
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