Recording
After attending a Grateful Dead concert,director Francis Ford Coppola asked Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann to record drum music for his film Apocalypse Now,much of which takes place along a river in the jungle during the Vietnam War. Hart and Kreutzmann,along with seven other musicians,assembled many different drums and other percussion instruments at the Club Front recording studio in San Rafael,California. While a rough cut of the movie was screened,they improvised the music,some of which ended up being used on the final soundtrack. [2] [3] The recording sessions took place over a period of ten days. Selections from the sessions were remixed and assembled into the final album. [4]
In addition to using a large collection of percussion instruments from around the world,provided by the various musicians,the Rhythm Devils constructed some new instruments. One of these was The Beast,an array of bass drums with different tones suspended from a large metal rack. After the recording of The Apocalypse Now Sessions,The Beast was incorporated into the "Drums" section of Grateful Dead concerts,an extended percussion duet performed by Hart and Kreutzmann in the middle of the second set of songs. [4] [5]
Another unusual percussion instrument built for the sessions,variants of which have been built and later used in Grateful Dead concerts and Mickey Hart's solo touring bands,was The Beam. This is a large aluminum I-beam (actually a C-shaped beam facing down with the strings across the flat outside-top surface) strung with 13 bass piano strings all tuned to the note of D (a Pythagorean mono-chord at various octaves). The Beam has a heavy-duty bridge and string anchor at one end and a nut with tuning hardware at the other end. It has a movable magnetic pickup block to facilitate capture and transmission of various tonal qualities. The pickup block feeds a volume pedal and various audio effects units,which route the signals through an amplifier or sound system. The Beam generates a large variety of low-frequency primary tones and harmonic overtones,and is played by hitting the strings with a percussion mallet,plucking the strings by hand or with a plectrum,scraping them with various implements (fingernails,plectrums,metal bars),or by pounding on the beam frame itself to induce a bell-like resonance of all the strings simultaneously. [4] [6]
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