March 1, 2026

I've been listening back to all of the Zappa Synclavier material, intending to transcribe and cover (or borrow) from it sometime soon. Little Beige Sambo has been a favorite of mine, from his excellent Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention album. It goes by so fast you can barely track, but the rhtyhms have always worked for me. Out on a run today I thought "Frank gave us a gift: there's a constant pulse in this piece", which makes it very easy to throw on a grid. So that's what I did. Using Ableton Live to bring it down to 60 bpm, now I have a hope of transcribing the lines. The samples are really blah, but I can hear him thinking of his band: there's clearly a hammond, bass, percussionist and drummer, of course. There are many grooves happening at this tempo I couldn't hear at full speed - more of this kind of thing to come. Pictured: a huge moon rose tonight as I drove home from the run I mentioned. Link to the post.