The curse

[ResonantOrder]

If your serious about getting back to your roots when you listen, you should first pick up a few books about how the brain works. Specifically which left/right functions can work in harmony.

You can literally learn theory, and use it in an unconscious fashion. Think more in terms of situations, colors, and emotions when you write. Learn to turn off the analytical bullshit when your not writing.

A healthy education in other artforms, such as painting, can give you a truly new opinion on what you hear because your perspective will be different.

I'd much rather be a moody musician than one of the stone-cold crazy engineers I always seem to turn into when I was younger. It's your brain that sorts out the sounds around you. Learn to control it.

[ResonantOrder]

BTW: I quit drinking coffee and other caffeine a couple of years back. My enjoyment of music doubled. Caffeine dulls the nerve endings in your ears. Specifically the higher frequencies which your brain will perceive as 'space' and cut down on the three dimensional image that a mix is really meant to give you.

[androidlove]

Well, I knew my gf was gonna give up the comp cause tATu was gettin ready to make out and she wanted the remote.

Speakin o that stuff, Gwen Stefani is more style than substance, and thank geeks for video.

Just rock out dude. Bang on that thing like the primate you are. Don't think twice. It's alright.

[herodotus]

usual grumble about daft colonials

You weren't bitching when we daft colonials saved your limey asses in 44-45 though were you??

Still, you seem intent on making up for being late for the last 2 world wars, by starting this one really early.

Do you know how the word 'jingoism' had it's beginning?

The following little ditty was apparantly quite popular in the London pubs before the Crimean war:

"We don't want to go to war, but by jingo if we do,

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too."

Lovely peaceful bunch you brits are!

That's good, but I still think that soccer player was the funniest.

[Sascha Franck]

try telling that to just about every Jazz musician in history.

Oh yes, tell that to Parker and the likes! They will defenitely agree with Karbion L. Forms!

Fwiw, some historical hard facts that need to be set straight:

We could perhaps agree that the main "innovation" (or whatever you may call it) was happening around the, say, 30ies-50ies. That was when Dixie, blues, marching band stuff and the likes somewhat merged and were "enhanced" by folks such as Fats Waller and, later on, Charlie Parker.

So, there were some piano players who thought they would get more interesting sounds when just adding notes (yes, more or less without exactly "knowing" what they were doing) or altering them (on dominant chords for instance).
And there were some soloists, such as Parker and Coltrane, who thought that all that diatonic chord note based dixiestyle soloing, no matter how technically challenging it was, sounded boring after a while. So they tried to expand the melodic vocabulary. And guess what? Right, again WITHOUT following ANY theory.
Admittedly, some of those players had a more or less good knowledge of classical theory - but the stuff the were actually playing couldn't be captured using classical approaches by any means!

Now, when you look around about jazz theory, you will most likely stumble over "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation" by George Russel - which essentially has been the first book actually explaining chord/scale relation theories as we know them today.
Now, take a deep breath and have a guess when that book was released! It was in freaking 1953! Yeah, right on, that's at least a decade AFTER bebop happened, a decade after the most famous jazz solos (and compings) had allready been played and recorded!
Parker had NO idea about it when playing "Cherokee", he was more or less just some gifted drughead, with enough of a twisted brain to think along the "woah, that's sounding wicked, lemme try that tonite on the Birdland sessions!" - and nothing else!
Parker and the likes just didn't know about anything "Oh, an Eb7 altered, let me play E mel minor over that". This simply wasn't explored yet. Still, they played "roughly" (see below) along those lines.

So, yeah... you need to learn theory to play jazz - do you still think, that statement holds any water, Matt? It just doesn't, IMO. As said, history wouldn't be proving this either.

One could even take this further. There's been a lot of analyzing happening, trying to see what all his stuff was about. Well, while there are some lines which could actually be explained theoretically, more than 50% of what people such as Parker were playing STILL can't be explained at all as they completely fail to fit into any theoretical concept.
There's no bebop scale (which is a laugh per se as it's nothing but a major/minor scale with a few chromatic passing notes) being used, no HM5, no Dom7alt. Their solos are STUFFED with "avoid" notes and the likes, and mind you, the "concept" of "outside" playing wasn't "invented" yet either.

And yes, all that is more or less proveable by historical facts; some of the greatest jazz inventors just had no clue about the things they were playing! The clues were coming later on (when Parker was allready dead... or almost).

Of course, the lydian chromatic concept HAD its influence, such as for Miles Davis, who took the inspirations he gathered from reading to "invent" modal jazz (as on "Kind of Blue"). Needless to say that later on, when fusion took place (more or less a direct follower of modal jazz) some people found this sort of jazz to sound "cold".
And there's also been others who actually went the exact opposite, such as in "play as many II-V progressions as fast as possible and play as many proper (chord) notes as possible over them" (as in horrible excersize-ish tunes such as "Giant Steps").
And finally, a bit later on, god had mercy with them and sent them free jazz ("Ok, you folks, I've got enough from all that theoretical BS, it's satans work, now go and play what you feel is inside you").
Not that I'd like free jazz at all, but it was a quite a relief after all that 100% TC (theoretically correctness) stuff.

Anyways, in the meantime some folks had been clever enough to make a business out of it, refining George Russels LCC, expanding it and writing sophisticated books about it too.
All the education business had been clever enough too. That's why you could study jazz all of a sudden.
The chord/scale theory approach now was established as the one and only thing to deal with. And that's still what's being teached in most music universities.
Anybody else wondering allready why there's so many "clones" coming out of those universities?

Bottomline: I DO think that too much of theoretical knowledge IS counterproductive regarding musical innovations. The same might apply to listening experiences (just what K.L.Forms stated) - while some years ago I might've just been blown away by something, I often find myself automatically analyzing some things these days.
And, mind you, I have experienced that myself (and still am...). Without patting myself on the back (why should I?), I can say that I have a pretty good knowledge of music theory, plus, I can also adopt/interprete that knowledge on the instrument of my choice (guitar).
But, do I compose/arrange anything sounding fresh, new or whatever? By all means: No!

A while ago I played in some rock/pop/grunge band and the singer was allways coming up with some "funny" chord changes and the likes. I used to be like "Dude, you can't use that chord there" - and I really meant it. Now, after some discussing and tryouts, what would you guess would we end up using? Right, in 95% of all cases it weren't my TC chord changes but the ones he used originally. And after a while even I thought they were the best ever - it's just that I never could've come up with anything like that myself. Caught in the TC trap...

All that might apply to sound "design" as well.
Would anybody think it was "sounddesign correctness" when the Beatles thought that they should strap the studio monitors, pin them on the wall, spin them around and record the results to get some sort of Leslie effect? Certainly nobody at the BBC studios found that to be correct at all...
Would they found it to be proper behaviour to cut the expensive 2" tape into myriads of snipplets, throw them all around and then glue them back together to get some sort of randomizer effect? Certainly not.
Would someone at Gibson (or Fender, I don't remember) call it correct treatment of their state of the art guitar amps when Duane Eddy penetrated their speakers with a screwdriver, just because after accidentally doing so he thought that the buzzing effect resulting from this sort of treatment would be somewhat cool, so he could expand it?
Would someone back then have thought that Eric Claptons Fender Champ's speaker out cabled straight into the instrument in of his Marshall would be the most high fidelic routing ever?

And, do you think the infamous "hoover" sound (along with playing parallel minor chords) was invented with knowledge? To actually ivent Trance?
Still, these days each and every trance kid is asking how to reproduce those sounds.
I'm sure the "inventor" (if there's any) just had some Roland synth and fooled with the parameters.
Just as Charlie Parker fooled around with the playing parameters of his tenor sax.

Bottomline: Yes, I do somewhat think that innovations are very often made by innocent people. Unfortunately this excludes me from all the fun.

Sorry for the long post,
Sascha

[Karbon L. Forms]

Last time I heard a sound that made me wonder was Daft Punks mad guitar. But that wonderment is mild compared to the absolute astonishment I experienced all those years ago when some American nerdy chaps called the Pixies were on "The Chart Show" playing Monkey Gone To Heaven. A few years later I could play most Pixies songs and the wonderment was diminished.

I remember once at a party we had some version of Fruity Loops or such like and were using a projector as a screen. I started farting about with beats and all the pill-heads were astonished at the ease with which I could create they're favourite genre. f**ks sake. But I remember being astonished by dance music too. Only dance stuff that freaks me these days is DnB but that's because I've not learnt how to do DnB mad drums. So if I do get round to learning I can have fun creating but my listening pleasure may be reduced.

Talking of diminished...
Jazz I only play by listening. Years ago I asked a jazz guitarist if he could show me how to play "Thank you boys..." from Janes Addictions Nothings Shocking. He said it was a stock jazz progression and proceeded to show me. So my jazz theory is this: take 3 or 4 "fancy" chord shapes and a couple more normal ones, use the whole fretboard, forget about key, go wild with rythm but keep returning to themes, pull funny faces and have fun and forget about ever playing jazz with anyone else!

[chagzuki]

That's life innit, you get bored with things and move on. Else we'd all still have the mental capacity of babies. Cue the jokes.