Lazy day in Cleveland...

So today the second team drove up here to meet my half. My team had the day off, but there's really not that much to do here and a bit too cold to go out and about. I pretty much haven't left my room; been surfin' and emailin' and video gamin' and movie watchin'.

Been doing a lot of composing in my head; the Annual Concert is in the Fall and I was originally planning to write a new composition for it. I had an slung-okedo piece with percussion originally, then also thought of a complicated, burning-chops piece with 3-4 people, but nothing got me really inspired. So my thoughts turned to re-arranging existing songs of ours.

How do you take a song that a regular audience is familiar with, and make it different without losing what makes that song special? That's the question. It makes you look at a song from the audience's point of view, which is a viewpoint I think many taiko people forget to look from or underestimate quite a bit.

I've been thinking about one or two songs in particular, which I'll talk more about in upcoming posts. Re-arranging a song makes me think about all the possibilities:

• Instrumentation - how does the song work if all the slant drums are down, or on upstands, or on slung okedo (portable drums)? What if you only used half the drums to make a mini-version of it?
  
• Personnel - what if you only had half the number of players? Can people play one pattern layered over another?
• Music - what if you made a straight song swung? Or if the tempo were drastically faster/slower? Add an Odaiko? Add metal percussion? Voice/kakegoe?
• Theme - what if you made a upbeat song into a driving one? Or turned a serious song into a playful one? And then how would you do that?

This sort of thought process not only makes you get to know a song better, it opens you up to composing something new alltogether. I highly recommend dissecting songs this way even if just as an intellectual exercise on long car trips. :)