Saturday, January 14, 2006

Tabbin' Tochigi

Tochigi is somewhere in Japan, home to a Mazda collision test center, and the name of my favorite tune off of Don Ross's new CD, 'Music for Vacuuming'. It's in DAEF#AE tuning, kinda odd, but beautiful. I have some video of him playing it unfinished in Canngington when I was down for his guitar weekend with Tony Mcmanus so I slowed that down to check the finger/fret postions. A pitch-corrected audio slow-down of the MP3 version of the song also helped(I used transcribe for this). Here is a link to a PDF of an early draft of the tab, check it out. It's just tabulature, no accompanying notation, I'm no Frankentab and I tend to agonize over that stuff so you're best off listening to the track for the timing (it's in 3/4). I still have to put in things like strum direction, add or move some of the augentation indicators around, fix some spacing, and PART F in the tab was rushed, so I'll have to test that and make sure it's ok. It's not perfect, he does so many little things different each time, but the tab allows me to play a reasonable facsimile of what Don does, and 'cause of the video, I know the fret positions, strums and fingering are right. It's funny, what he plays on my home vid is all of the parts of Tochigi, but improvised in totally different orders.

Send suggestions/fixes/corrections/insults/laughter to carrdav@gmail.com

For all you Gobyfishers!

Cheers!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Music for Vacuuming? Maybe cause it sucks? Sorry, but this is not Don's best work IMHO. Tochigi just sounds like an experiment in repetitive rhythmic pattern to me, no melody, all groove.

Zartimus said...

Hehehe. Dat's funny. I guess one sets themselves up with a title like that.

Hey' everyone's entitled to think what they want.

Personally I've found that Don's stuff grows on me. There has been previous CD's of his where I get drawn to the funky slap tunes and pretty much ignore the rest after one listen. Then, sometime later I'll hear a tune again I've previously tried to ignore and and I'll just start to 'get it'. Like 'Elevation ' on Robot Monster. What a tune! But it didn't make it into my MP3 player the first time.

I also think playing them does it to me as well. Once I can play a tune of his I start to like it a whole lot more. Tochigi is a blast to play, brings a smile to your face, give it a try! It is repetative, but that's because it's designed to be modular. You repeat each part as often as you find nessesary(I guess your take on that would make it a 60 second song)

What about "Brooke's Waltz"? Beautiful tune! I'm gonn atab it next. I also like "Never Got To Pernambuco". I'm not crazy about his uhh, techno experiments, but even those grow on me after awhile.

Thanks for reading.