Beats and Chords and Symbol Crashes

Our dwelling has a basement. No one in the compound has a basement.  Ours has had a small storage area added to it, down below the kitchen. The ceiling is five feet off the ground and the overall area is smaller than a prison cell.  The tiling makes for a sharp, antiseptic, acoustic nightmare.  The drums, and a bunch of instruments have all been stored down in here.  As regular readers know I recently went to the trouble of setting up the trap set for my younger daughter, who’s suddenly decided she likes to drum.  Today we had some time and I brought my amp down so we could properly jam. 

This little gal is surprisingly proficient on the skins.  She emanates this undeniable confidence.  It only lasts for short bursts, of course.  She doesn’t have stamina or callouses.  I know its there though, as I’ve sat at a drum kit over a hundred times and I absolutely do not have it.  I aim to blow on it like an ember in the cold.  I showed her how she could download a metronome app to help her keep time and this was a big hit, as we sped it up and slowed it down.  “See what five - four sounds like.”  My older daughter miraculously deigned to join us in the cave.  I’d brought down a microphone so the singer could sing somewhere besides the shower.

The sound was unique. Necessarily loud, in order to accommodate the drum set beats and chords and symbol crashes collided with dulcet screeching and minor seventh phrasings, ricocheting around the space, like music in a blender until feedback rose to drown all, again and then again.  Heaven, in other words, or perhaps a room with a skylight in Purgatory. 

A temporal paradise though.  Certainly not eternal.  I tried to have the little one repeat a pattern on the snare while the older rhymed.  “One, two, three, four, yes, over and over, steady.”  “Basement” is tough to rhyme with.  Try ‘Sunday’.”  She landed her last word on ‘Monday,’ and then the next line with ‘Tuesday’ but the energy was fading.  People had homework.  People had to go to the bathroom.  “Jam” suggests a bit too much commitment.  A jam-ette, rather, but it wasn’t bad.