MMA grooves, share them here !

[sciurius]

Often when setting up a new song I'm mostly interested in chords, progression and rhythm. For this I developed a couple of 'neutral' grooves: Neutral34, Neutral44 and Neutral68.

Characteristics are:

• chords are legato (organ) and span full measures
• a simple drum pattern (sidekick plus closed highhat) plays the rhythm

So you can hear the chords and progressions, feel the rhythm, without extra instruments and articulations and ornaments getting in the way.

The neutral grooves come for times 3/4 (ONE two three), 4/4 (ONE two three four) and 6/8 (ONE two three FOUR five six).

[bvdp]

Good idea. I usually just take a groove that is "close" and edit the crap out of it Building up instead of down is probably a more intelligent way to go. Do you want me to include this file in the distro or is it just as well left here?

[sciurius]

Yes, it is ok to include them in the distro.

[sciurius]

In my quest for flexible and easy ways to deal with the specifics of fingerpicking guitar I think I may have reached a point that my findings may be of interest for other MMA guitar players (if any?).

One of the basic issues to tackle is that fingerpicking requires different patterns for different chords. For example, an E chord would have a bass on the 6th (E) string and then picks strings 4, 3 and 2. An A chord would have bass on the 5th (A) string and pick strings 4, 3 and 2, while a D chord would have bass on the 4th (D) string and pick strings 3, 2 and 1. Traditionally patterns are tied to grooves, so my first approach was to define a groove for each of the patterns and switch grooves.

Code:

Groove G4A
  10  Am * 2
Groove G4EE
  12  F  G
Groove G2AA
  13  C  G
Groove G4E
  14  F

and so on. This works, but makes it hard to use grooves of other kind of accompagniment.

Fortunately MMA is capable of switching patterns within grooves, which leads to a second approach: define macros that switch the picking patterns in the active groove. For example, a macro PPE sets the Plectrum pattern to a specific fingerpicking pattern (with bass E). PPA sets another pattern (with bass A). This makes things slightly easier:

Code:

$PPE
  1   Em
$PPA
  2   Am
  3   B7
$PPE
  4   Em

Carrying this one step further by introducing macros that call subroutines:

Code:

DefCall PPE Chords
Plectrum Sequence PPE
  1    $Chords
EndDefCall
Set PPE Call PPE

then the song becomes a bit more compact:

Code:

$PPE   Em
$PPA   Am
       B7
$PPE   Em

(even though we loose line numbers... not a big deal)

But wait! MMA is a very good guitar player, much better than I am. Why? Because MMA has very long fingers  . So instead of defining different patterns I now define a single pattern and change the chord shapes to go with the pattern. MMA has no problems with this:

Code:

Begin Plectrum Shape
    //     B   x x x   bass on 6, pick 4,3,2
    Em     0 2 2 0 0 0
    Am     5 0 2 2 1 0
    B7     7 2 1 2 0 2
    D     10 0 0 2 3 2
End

The song becomes:

Code:

$PP1   Em
       Am
       B7
       Em

The call to $PP1 is only necessary when changing to a new groove -- which is usually infrequent.

Attached two boiletplates for the sequence switching approach. Comments welcome.

[bvdp]

Excellent!

Can we get this flushed out into one txt file and I'll include in the main distro.

[sciurius]

I went one step further and created a plugin.
See https://github.com/sciurius/mma-plugins/tree/master/fpp .

[bvdp]

Cool. Plugins can be so useful! One of these days we'll have to gather the "other places there is mma stuff" and put it on the main site. I'm going to concentrate on getting 20.12 out right now!

[sciurius]

One of these days we'll have to gather the "other places there is mma stuff" and put it on the main site.

I have three repos:

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-grooves: A set of grooves for MMA (Musical Midi Accompaniment)

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-plugins: A set of plugins for MMA (Musical Midi Accompaniment)

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-mode: Emacs major mode for mma (Musical MIDI Accompaniment)

[bvdp]

100%!!!

I've added these links to the "cool stuff" page: https://mellowood.ca/mma/coolstuff.html

[sciurius]

This style implements JazzBallad4, a lazy jazz combo (guitar, bass, drums). It has straightforward strums on the beats.

Two variants: JazzBallad4A and JazzBallad4B.

Time signature is 4/4.

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-grooves/tree/master/jazzballad4

[bvdp]

Thanks for this. Sounds great.