KVR Audio

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:06 pm

jancivil wrote:I saw this film when I was, I dunno, 14 or 15, heard this and was home.

Yeah, I saw it back when I was young too. Perfect example of what I was talking about. I can listen to that for a little, then it wears me out and becomes monotonous .. I hear a constant "A" note on that over and over and over and over... Turn off the sitar and I could enjoy the tabla for quite a bit longer.

EDIT: And actually I hear the A as being a hair flat.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:11 pm

And yeah, it were the rhythm
Stay with this vid, it's simply amazing.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:34 pm

SJ_Digriz wrote:
jancivil wrote:I saw this film when I was, I dunno, 14 or 15, heard this and was home.
Yeah, I saw it back when I was young too. Perfect example of what I was talking about. I can listen to that for a little, then it wears me out and becomes monotonous .. I hear a constant "A" note on that over and over and over and over... Turn off the sitar and I could enjoy the tabla for quite a bit longer.

EDIT: And actually I hear the A as being a hair flat.

Ravi Shankar's 'Sa', 'tonic' is C#. Pretty darn close to the C# I just hit on Scarbee Jay-Bass. A, is there an A in that raga? It's more or less Bilaval Thaat, which I imagine he chose because it's like major. There's an occasional variant 'flat 3' and 'flat 7'. The pitches on a sitar belong to the raga, and the thing gots movable frets for it. If you're hearing constant A literally, yeah that would bug me a lot...

This one is better to show something that is far from 'tonal'. Like all of it, *1* never lets up. This sounds quite a lot like Veena, deep... sits on #4 a lot, this type of thing sends me

https://youtu.be/hbykZudNKwQ?t=2m49s

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:34 pm

There are tons of musical styles where rhythm is the dominant aspect. Or, where they are equal to the notes. I started to like Flamenco guitar a lot more when I started to understand the rhythmic content vs the melody/counterpoint. That's appreciation beyond the pure amount of skill it takes to play that stuff well.

This is an example of why the "best x player" stuff annoys the shit out of me. Anyone who has been to, or watched a Flamenco contest should walk out humbled. There are 100 guys in that annual tourney you never heard of that are better than 99% of the guys in your "underrated" shred oriented lists.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:39 pm

Yeah. LOL
Don't get me started.

Flamenco is first/foremost dance.

BULERIA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16i4OXJTPW8

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:41 pm

hmm... so you made me go pull out my tuner.

The drone tone (sorry don't know the correct term for the sort of pedal tone in that style of music) is somewhere between C# and D. So I guess it is flat to my general hearing.

However, I was referring to the tonal center. For some reason my ear hears an A after a bit. Once I hear that, it starts to get annoying. I'm wasn't saying I'm correct by the way. Just that's the physical response I get when listening to that type of music. I also have tinnitus that is sensitive to certain pitches. It's kind of like that. For some reason my brain locks into a pitch and I can't shake it. Kind of like getting crappy pop songs stuck in your head.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:55 pm

There will be, actually quite a lot of tamboura + sitar (sympathetic strings) where the (buzzing) sound gets on my nerves before too long at all.
In compressed vids on youtube, in poor recordings particularly.

I don't have anything like absolute pitch. I was pretty sure of C#, which isn't unusual and I checked it against Jay Bass (recently installed, I didn't do anything to it) and it's close enough for me to go with.

After about a year at conservatory I started reacting against western, well hegemony. I'm not very conditioned by tuning fork to begin with. I couldn't work with the results of a strobe tuner, that's out of tune. Guitar intonation is complicated. So is piano. I considered apprenticing as a piano tuner but it's just... hard.

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:58 pm

jancivil wrote:I considered apprenticing as a piano tuner but it's just... hard.

lol, quoted for truth

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 7:07 pm

By the way, I'm primarily a guitar player .. but when I was young I did a lot of quartet (including barbershop) and madrigal type of singing. For whatever reason that has made it so I can pull a pretty much dead on E or A out at will as long as I am not influenced prior to humming the note. So, not perfect pitch by any stretch. More "trained" pitch. But that may also be why my silly brain latches on the note centers even if I don't want it to.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 7:40 pm

When I was a child, I mean pre-adolescent, my ear for pitch was really poor.
I made myself learn things off of records. So, one of the things I wanted, *the* thing which finally pushed me to guitar from drums, was Hendrix. Hendrix would tune down *around* a half-step a lot. So I was tuning the thing to match what my idea of what was going on was. So it's all intervals for me. I sang the lines and trial-and-error'd with guitar. Now, I watched a lot of guitar on TV and I would find ways to get into shows for free, I tried to see everybody. I started with blues cliches, I got a pretty good idea of the layout pretty quick.

But I have a whambly ear. If it's guitar, and here's open strings enough I know what the notes are, not absolute pitch but relative to the guitar. I'm pretty used to that kinda sorta C# for Sitar. They do not use a tuning fork I don't think. But there is the harmonium, but that's death for some. Some people don't buy it, but keys have a certain sound even on 'objective' instruments, synths, whatever. My guesses range from instant total nailing it to in the ballpark (flat keys, horns keys).

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:57 pm

https://youtu.be/AGtMv-EQp20?t=1m6s

SODDI · Post by **SODDI** » Thu Apr 06, 2017 1:19 am

I do not think music written in different tonalities sounds bad or ugly (insert obligatory gamelan reference here).

I really like Schoenberg and the Vienna school's work. But only the smallest possible ensembles, the string quartets. Following the lines of the violins in my head. It's astringent!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TDlBCrK56E

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Thu Apr 06, 2017 1:58 am

Not sure why Steve Reich isn't on here. This was one of the first ... what I consider .. atonal pieces that convinced me I could like it. This is simply brilliant use of cadence and texture. (by the way @jancivil, the Davis/Jackson album is an all time fave). I'm a jazz fusion guy at heart I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXJWO2FQ16c

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Thu Apr 06, 2017 2:00 am

oh and since this had a bunch of Zappa to start with. You really need to go to the source for that part of Zappa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiorncOFpcg

rp314 · Post by **rp314** » Thu Apr 06, 2017 2:08 am

Speaking of Arnold, I recall that back in the good old days Herodotus himself once dared folks at KVR to listen to Moses und Aron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxOKQGCpJlo

I wonder how many took him up on it...

Examples Of Tonal And Atonal Music