gtZip wrote:I have this weird experience where if the drummer lays something down, and then I play to it - it's much harder for me to lock in than it is if we are playing at the same time. Even if a click track had been used.
Without a click, or with any wavering meter, it's a biotch to lock in - but not so hard if there's a wavering meter live.
Am I nuts?
Have you ever played along with a drum circle? Even people who normally cannot keep a basic beat on their own, find it nearly effortless to flow along when in a group of other drummers that are playing. A sympathetic resonance effect. I would suspect this sort of resonance even occurs in ways yet to be documented. When good musicians play together live, their heartbeats and breathing tend to synchronize. A similar harmonizing syncro effect is probably also happening in the subtle magnetic and electrical fields of the musician's bodies.
When drum machines first appeared on the market, almost right away people were asking for "humanization" features. That led to analysis of great drummers grooves, which found that they tend to 'swing' .. pushing some beats ahead, lagging others behind, making the music 'breathe'.
I used to manually "smear" the quantized timings of some notes by a few tics or so here and there on my midi sequencer to loosen the feel a bit.
Now after 40 or so years the machine beat is the dominant source of rhythm for pop music. We must now play like machines until we are smart enough to build a machine that can play like a human.
http://youtu.be/mLwvJvcYyrQ
LOVE is the ANSWER!