Warren Waren

Dr. Warren Waren is a Texas-based guitarist who plays rock ‘n blues throughout central Texas. By day, he teaches statistics and the Sociology of Popular Music at Texas A&M University in College Station. By night, he and his band The Bad455’s, rock every roadhouse, juke joint, biker bar, and honky tonk from La Grange to Austin.

As a young man, he had the opportunity to play in a Beatles band in Bolivia, with an R&B revue in Nashville, a Prince cover band in Minneapolis, a little heavy metal work in Israel, and some blues jams in New Zealand. He even went on a two-month tour of a place called the Soviet Union—from Siberia to Poland. Not bad for a kid from Oklahoma. His high school guidance counselor retired in shame.

More recently, in mysterious circumstances in an Estonian sauna, Dr. W was inspired to bring quintuplet figures to modern music. Quintuplet guitar licks are hard, so he renamed them "futtuplets." His inspiration turned to obsession as he researched, created, developed, and documented more than 400 futtuplets over the last few years. When the pandemic put a stop to his performance schedule, he began to write and record it all down. The fruit of that labor is the Futtuplet Series—a pentalogy of books that introduces the issue, then applies the 5-note rhythmic subdivision to repetitive figures, melodic sequences, arpeggios, and modal pentatonics.

All the while, making sure that futtuplets are cool, not intellectual. Dangerous, not pretentious. Rock ‘n roll, not homework.