this wasn’t quite good enough to post to my own blog, so what the hell. i’ll post it here.
i just did one of the hardest things i’ve had to do in a while.
i cleaned off my vintage Roland TR-707 drum machine, plugged it in, and lo and behold!, it still works. problem is, the AA batteries that make up the memory system were shot (why they didn’t leak all over the place is anybody’s guess). so all my old patterns that i worked so hard on years ago were completely corrupted. i mean, Sun Ra makes more coherent sense than this stuff did. only a drummer – and i’m not kidding here – with more than a dozen limbs could’ve played that stuff.
so here’s the hard part: i just dumped the whole thing. cleared. deleted. everything. gone.
forever.
it hurt; i feel like i just killed 64 children. some of them were really intensely cool kids, too. although, like i said, they all got some kind of bad virus and mutated into grotesquely bizarre and disturbing creatures.
the coolest drum pattern i ever made is on a song very very few of you have ever heard, and it’s so cool it sounds like something off an unreleased Peter Gabriel album (until i start singing, that is). too bad. also the wicked drum beats from “monster” (my grunge-era, er, grunge song). also the one i did that very closely replicated Gary Thrasher‘s 626 pattern that we used to record the beautiful Loving Scares track “At 3AM”. but the beats i’ll miss the most is the one from the aforementioned “unbreathed” – they were tricky as shit; so hard to replicate that i’ve tried many times, and failed miserably each time.
so long, old friends.
i bought a shitload of AA batteries today.
