Endless possibilities - but everyone thinking along the same route?

[tapiodmitriyevich]

Hi guys,

I'm just some kind of bedroom producer for fun and for myself, open for a lot of music. Mostly I listen to Ae like style, but also like 50% at home in the classical world, Shostakovich, Bruckner, also Purcell/Baroque etc. I'm playing clarinet since 5 years and currently I am recording and sorting my clarinet sounds, in order to be able to use them in whatever way. My dream is, ... I wish I could create a complex symphony from electronic instruments... which "works". "Works" to me means, in a musical way. I don't want weird instruments to be the selling point, but the music. Classical instruments work, because we learned, it's a cultural process, instrument x helps with feeling/emotion y. Electronic instruments are lacking this culture. This is basic challenge I think.
I see things also from this simple point: Classical composers like Shostakovich are great in creating complex works, great at music and music theory. They know which instrument can do what they need, which limits it has etc. etc.
But in in theory, we have more possibilities. We have an endless # of instruments (vst+fx). Still we create no big ideas. But we should be able to create even better music, but don't! Well, I want to try. Probably will fail but hey... fun.

OK, now sporadically going through the tutorials of friendly people on Youtube, I get soooo disappointed, as so many of them seem to think the same way.
- "Phat bass in Massive"
- "Phat leadz with Sylenth"
- "How to create a super wobble with serum"

I mean, they could do so much more but their way of thinking seems to lead to some generic sounding electronic dance music. It's disappointing! Guys like Ae show, there could be done so much more, just look at tracks like Pendulu Hv moda.. Open thinking! Phat Bass. Pffffft. Start experimenting with a weak bass. A broken bass. A whatever bass. A bass which is not a bass. Whatever serves the music you have in mind...

I don't know. Maybe I just want to say I watched the wrong tutorials

Thanks for your time.

[DJ Warmonger]

1. Make standard sounds easily.
2. Make weird sounds with any experimental techiques that you own

What is the problem here?

You can't expect anyone to ride before they learn to walk.

[ATN69]

I guess the simple answer is that Music becomes popular simply because many people happens to like it. That's also why many people go down the same route. Partly because the Composer like it themselves but it is also liked by many people.

I Heard many experimental stuff that can only be classified as weird, and sometimes I would not even call it Music. But once in a rare while sounds, riffs, rythms or other stuff comes out of the experimental stuff and it will become a new norm, and a new route that everyone will take.

[thomekk]

I totally get your point.

Lots of the people who get access to the promising available tools have no musical background possibly.
But devices. All easy. More can do "music" now.
The other thing is: Some heroes with success are the role-models. So they want to sound like them.
(but that's probably an old story)

The electronic age cut up musical history. Handplayed music is more difficult. Therefore more asking for the "wobble". Ignoring the chances what else could be done.

And yeah, this is possible

[Zombie Queen]

People who want something different, don't look for tutorials.

[ghettosynth]

People who want something different, don't look for tutorials.

This!

Plus, the music arrogance dripping off of quasi-classical producers who don't seem to understand that classical music has managed to force itself into the same "popular" corner that electronic music has, only with respect to a different distribution minimum, are just about as annoying as popular artists who think the phat bass is the end all and be all.

There are vast quantities of interesting information regarding how to create more complex and interesting sounds, if you can't find them or lack the skill or education to read them, then it seems you have some growth to do yourself.

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/

[Zexila]

People make music that makes them happy, plenty got into the music making to make that same music, if guy wants phat bass, guy should have phat bass and big phat smile on his face, he deserves it.

[jancivil]

"quasi-classical producers" sounds ghastly, I'm happy to have never encountered...

- *producers* being the operative noun of the sentence particularly. I really don't know from 'quasi-classical' but it almost makes sense as follows "producers". I do see people post their 'Symphony in G minor' or some shit, and that's just weird for 2017. Conservatism is weird I'm sorry. And it strikes me as half-baked at best. "quasi-", almost... ok


I'm not a 'big ideas' sort, at least in terms of symphonic grandeur, but my whole thing is making electronic-sourced sound material work with acoustic-derived and old-school electric guitar/bass and drum kits, integrated. I like making patches to suggest parts of the orchestra, sometimes a rather full orch, scaled over ranges...
OR accidents and the unpredictable suggesting material I won't have conjured in isolation.


Don't look to youtube tutorials, dig deeper.
seriously

[xoxos]

Music serves a function in society, and that function isn't necessarily what people who listen to music think it is. i could say a lot of things, but historically, music is greatly related to social functions. especially if something absurd like there were vested and enacted interests in reaching the attention of a populace, it's likely that the music a person hears about is the music fitting various cultural functions. and sure there are esoteric musics for exotic or "satisfying" "refined" tastes but no necessity of mechanisms whereby you may hear of them. it may be in our interests to make sure you don't hear too much of anything that encourages growth as you say, maybe thinking big ideas isn't what we'd like to see in the little, profitable man. certainly talking about them, around here, will earn you a bludgeoning, if there isn't a less conspicuous way of tidying it up.

i won't be so wearisome as to list all my favourite musics, or my own preferred abstractions,

lately i've been thinking of a track two forum members produced c. 1999, hardware synths and lots and lots of wav processing. they passed material back and forth for two months and ended up with 15 minutes that are as tech savvy and musical as you'd want, but no one here has ever heard it.

here's one from the guy who makes pluggotic vst, from c. 2005 iirc,

first track, nonzerorisk
https://soundcloud.com/pluggotic/albums

if you catch the words, you are a pot smoker and your attention is far in advance of most who will read through this forum in a year.

i hear more from the birds than the people, i have a good attention. some people i guess don't need possibilities so much.

oh jan - i'd say notable modern "classicists" nikmis first place.

[jancivil]

well, if they are notable in my world, they're not half-baked. Even if I strongly disagree aesthetically. They do not go about calling themselves 'producer' which was the context for my quizzical take.
(Stravinsky FFS had a neo-classical period. What are you actually even talking about? Do you know.)

And, what lack of "mechanisms" for obtaining access to more "esoteric" or developed notions. EDIT: sorry, no "necessity" of or for... I don't know what that looks like. So, the problem is necessity versus... what? People are very interested OR THEY'RE NOT.

It's not as, UHNH 'democratic' as buying sample packs and/or grooving to a set thing someone provided to you for the low low price of, or facile reception of some jiveass's silly music theory regurgitations on their blog or their youtube account. Entry means having done yo due diligence, can't be faked.

A certain form of "cultural functions" of teh hard rock 'n roll lost much of its appeal to me at ~16. I saw The Grateful Dead 3 yrs later and I'm glad I got stoned via proximity to people there for a social thing but I went to the back of Charlotte Coliseum, where I knew the soundman was aiming the mix for essentially and got to hear the thing. The jazz type interaction of persons, give and take is an exchange, doesn't happen in isolation.

[jancivil]

Got to love it when people that just have not come up in the classical world have strong, strong opinions about what goes on.

Yes, there have been orchestras that have painted themselves in a(n aesthetic) corner only doing the stock repertoire one supposes, AND in an attempt to remain ingratiated with their FUNDING which may have been conservative.
But frankly that strikes me as received journalism, and is kind of thirty- if not forty-year old news.

My experience is that the vital orchestra supports new music. And there is new music coming from the academy, as suspect as one's reception of 'academic' may be.

Everybody talking needs to hear a good orchestra and chorus doing Mozart's sacred music and thereby get true religion.

[ghettosynth]

"quasi-classical producers" sounds ghastly, I'm happy to have never encountered...

- *producers* being the operative noun of the sentence particularly. I really don't know from 'quasi-classical' but it almost makes sense as follows "producers". I do see people post their 'Symphony in G minor' or some shit, and that's just weird for 2017. Conservatism is weird I'm sorry. And it strikes me as half-baked at best. "quasi-", almost... ok

We're almost in agreement, in a sense, there's more, but I don't have any interest in spilling letters over it. I'm busy watching a movie about Richthofen and machine guns.

Don't look to youtube tutorials, dig deeper.
seriously

Or do do them, but stop whining as if you're above them when it seems that, in fact, you, i.e., the OP, do need them.

[jancivil]

I disagree with a lot of John Adams. Now, I was there using the same office as he before he became famous.
"Do you know who stole my aspirin?!"
I knew him to say hi to in Panhandle park as he walked his dog. Then he got familiar with, what's that guy was conductor of SFSO? de Vaart?

Minimalism was a big idea of doing... I think of that as doing small things on purpose. But there's this whole layer of talk to support it, journalism, music writers have LOTS to talk about with such a thing. Nixon in China, I have no time for it. I looked at the score, it goes on and on with like a 256 bar ostinato. BUT, I tell you this, he's not half-baked as a musician, he's the real thing.

[jancivil]

if you catch the words...

... nikmis first place.

: words aren't music. Life is short. Hear my music rather than that.

this word 'nikmis' I'm sorry, I don't know it.

birds are compelling at times, but the more you know about it... the bird tends to have a program running and it's a regurgitation of its, uahh culture. AND its tutelage.
The mockingbird may be quite transcending, OTOH. I heard birds at U Az one day stoned and it was an epiphany. It were a mockingbird as lead, feeding everybody's song back to them, perhaps in a synthesis/a permutation of...

[ghettosynth]

Everybody talking needs to hear a good orchestra and chorus doing Mozart's sacred music and thereby get true religion.

I get that from tacos.