I've always thought this piece sounds like a it should be playing behind the opening sequence of a dramatic TV show. It came about from experimenting with a new tool, an Akai MPD24 MIDI-over-USB pad controller. Here it is in a picture from the old mangobananas studio in Ithaca, NY, just a few weeks before this recording:

From my studio log: "On April 1, 2009, I was playing around at the end of a work day with the Akai MPD24, and came up with this killer beat and laid it in. Then I was playing with a slap funk bass sound on the MPD24, and enabled the full velocity setting where no matter what it sends the highest velocity note. With that bass patch above a certain note it does a hammer-on, which led me to finding this cool bass riff. I doubled that on piano next, and as usual a piano melody stumbled out when I wasn't recording but I caught it with the capture performance key command (I use ctrl-opt-cmd-R --HIGHLY recommended!!). And then I was playing with a bass synth patch and doubled the funk bass on that, and then caught a solo I goofed off with that same bass patch way up high that sounds really cool."

This ended up on my instrumental album from 2010, cymbal monkeys.

Thanks for listening!

-Andy


download: grind.mp3