What if we don't stick to a genre?

[kocio21]

House, techno, dubstep etc. it's not really THAT drastic style change. You don't change between EDM, classic jazz, death metal and country music, everything you mentioned is some form of electronic music. At least for someone who is not crazy obsessive about categorizing.
I mean, I'm into rock/metal stuff. I assure you that if someone released album where songs were mixed between death metal, black metal, melodic death metal, trash metal, classic heavy etc. purist would go apeshit over it. But 90+% of people couldn't care less because they don't really care what difference between melodic death and classic death is, it's just loud, aggressive music with growls.

Just make sure your sound is coherent, mix and master on album should be similar on every song, so every song sound clearly like it's from that album, despite of it being in slightly different genres. The voice of your vocalist is most important things as most people can only differentiate one band from another by voice of vocalist.

[DJ Warmonger]

House, techno, dubstep etc. it's not really THAT drastic style change.

You don't DJ, do you?

You don't change between EDM, classic jazz, death metal and country

But the difference between house, techno and dubstep IS equal to difference between classic jazz, country and death metal. Just because the latter two make extensive use of guitar doesn't make them any similiar.

I mean, I'm into rock/metal stuff.

So you clearly don't understand other stuff

[kocio21]

No, I absolutely don't DJ. Neither does 99,9% of people that possibly would listen to your music. If you suspect that you will play your music only to other producers and few freaks obsessed with genre categorization it maybe matters. Otherwise it does not matter.

I can tell difference between techno, house, trance, dubstep and so on but I don't really care and very few people care. Same goes with metal and probably all other genres.

[sqigls]

House, techno, dubstep etc. it's not really THAT drastic style change. You don't change between EDM, classic jazz, death metal and country music, everything you mentioned is some form of electronic music. At least for someone who is not crazy obsessive about categorizing.
I mean, I'm into rock/metal stuff. I assure you that if someone released album where songs were mixed between death metal, black metal, melodic death metal, trash metal, classic heavy etc. purist would go apeshit over it. But 90+% of people couldn't care less because they don't really care what difference between melodic death and classic death is, it's just loud, aggressive music with growls.

Just make sure your sound is coherent, mix and master on album should be similar on every song, so every song sound clearly like it's from that album, despite of it being in slightly different genres. The voice of your vocalist is most important things as most people can only differentiate one band from another by voice of vocalist.

...and which century are YOU from?

[DJ Warmonger]

I don't really care and very few people care.

We are at KVR, music producers forum. Some people here actually do care about stuff. What you do here is like going to doctor who tells you "don't care, you will die someday anyway."

This is also why some songs get Grammy awards and others get 0 plays at streaming services

[deastman]

Regarding live performance, I think the expectation is that you will perform live as much as you can within practical limitations. If you are only one person, that probably means triggering sequences in Ableton with a pad controller, and playing along on a keyboard. Having other instruments on stage to perform certain songs is definitely a good way to play up the theatrical aspect. Then there are groups like Underworld, where the mixing board becomes their main instrument for live performance.

As for the idea of you being onstage and not playing any instrument, that is also nothing new. Yazoo we're doing it decades ago, with Vince pressing play on a sequencer and kicking back to enjoy a glass of wine. Pet Shop Boys made a massive career out of barely playing anything (often with additional offstage musicians backing them up). As an electronic musician, you need to strike a balance between feeling like you are actually doing something during a performance, while also understanding that performance is theater and the theatrical side is just as important as your musical talent.

[kocio21]

I don't really care and very few people care.

We are at KVR, music producers forum. Some people here actually do care about stuff. What you do here is like going to doctor who tells you "don't care, you will die someday anyway."

This is also why some songs get Grammy awards and others get 0 plays at streaming services

Don't get me wrong, I care too.

We are at music production forum. That's right. People here care for lot of stuff that average listeners don't. It's funny how there are pages on pages of discussion about what compressor sounds more like hardware, which synth sound more 'analogue' as if people knew what a compressor is etc.

But I do understand, that we love music production process and this stuff is relevant for us, even if anyone else doesn't give a shit.

But genres? If anything, I would expect in this forum it would be even less relevant. Genres and especially subgenres are mostly very loose clues for people to make it easier to pick something from the shelf in the shop. What kind of question is 'can I put few different genres on album'. Of course you can. Why not? There will be people who will like whole album, or dislike whole album or like some songs and despise others.

It used to be that someone would release album and then reviewers tried to categorize it and label it somehow just to make it little easier for listeners and now it's the other way, people are making music straight into artificial labels.

[Functional]

But genres? If anything, I would expect in this forum it would be even less relevant. Genres and especially subgenres are mostly very loose clues for people to make it easier to pick something from the shelf in the shop. What kind of question is 'can I put few different genres on album'. Of course you can. Why not? There will be people who will like whole album, or dislike whole album or like some songs and despise others.

The discussion has been interesting and unfortunately I've no time yet to participate in it (tomorrow should be able to again). But I'd like to point out that I think I misphrased what I've been talking about and people here connected the dots themselves. My primary concern is: what if the material in the album feels more like a compilation of songs with little relation between the songs themselves. It was just easier to talk in terms of genres because you can have two genres that are very, very different from each other.

It's not just a matter "techno sounds the same as house music to most people". You can listen to Vatican Shadow and then you could listen to something like 6th Borough Project. Nope, it's not the same even to the casual listener who, supposedly, cares for nothing. Even the most casual listener does, in fact, care. Any DJ could witness this by going to a club where people will likely listen to the "big room" stuff and then just put on some Sandwell District. Hey, they're drunk and you move from big room to techno. Can't go wrong, right? Nope, you'll go wrong.

You could do the same with, say, Sd Laika & Deepchord. Give "Great God Pan" a try. As soon as you reached your limit (I imagine not many people can tolerate that!), then listen to anything from the album Sommer. So you have grime and dub techno. To most people it will be not the same.

But the issue isn't really in this. And I do appreciate so far the different points of views to this question. I just have to point out that I think I made a mistake by talking of genres.

[foosnark]

But I'd like to point out that I think I misphrased what I've been talking about and people here connected the dots themselves. My primary concern is: what if the material in the album feels more like a compilation of songs with little relation between the songs themselves.

That can get pretty subjective. Listeners might see connections between the songs that the musician(s) never really intended, or they might not see connections that were intended.

Personally I think most albums really are just compilations of unconnected songs, but with enough in common that you can listen to it without thinking "this track doesn't belong here". It's less common for the album to be more cohesive than that and have a common theme or story to it. And there are exceptions -- Exxxtreme's acoustic hit that wound up selling metal albums to people who don't like metal, or "A Door Is Ajar" at the end of Kronos Quartet's "Winter Was Hard" album, or the like.

[dark water]

The key issue is what expectations you have or hope for regarding its success.
You may very likely have to compromise, edit or re-record (create new) songs depending on your aims and those of the label / 'imagined audience'.

We don't personally have any expectations of our success nor do we have an imaginary audience in our minds. My concerns have more to do with how our music is best presented to people in album format if we opt in for that. Doing albums makes sense, but I personally can't tell of many examples where songs are that disconnected from each other, whereas I fear that this will be the case of us considering where we're currently heading.

TBH, does it matter then what you do, if there are no pressures / expectations?

You're over-thinking this.

Trust your heart / instincts and do whatever floats your boat.

[Functional]

Okay, so we had a talk about this subject and result was quite surprising. I was apparently being bit too optimistic for now and according to the singer, we don't even have enough material for any record label to be interested in us for now. So she wasn't originally talking about near-future.

So initially we will release our music on our own either through Bandcamp or Soundcloud, but apparently not both. She prefers Soundcloud because it's more familiar to her and the page outlay isn't as bad (though still it is bad) as it is in Bandcamp (that kind of stuff is her job, actually) and in addition her friends are in Soundcloud. I prefer Bandcamp because you can download a whole album instead song-to-song basis.

If we need vinyl/CD, according to her we can arrange that on our own. And apparently local labels don't even arrange gigs for us, so we'd still have to do that on our own.

On plus side, we can pretty much release our music as we wish. So we don't necessarily have to make albums or EP's at all initially (which is why Soundcloud could be a better option anyway). In the long run though, I think we still want to opt in for album format once we have more experience.

And regarding live, we actually went yesterday to a concert (on short notice) to observe what's going on in the real world (with the chance to observe the setup as well and connect the dots ourselves). So I guess we'll be doing a lot more of that and hopefully it will help us.

Nevertheless, all the info in here has been very helpful and gives at least food for thought, so thanks to everyone. You'd think we already had this figured out but apparently that's how us amateurs are (well, i'm more the amateur anyway).

I'll still continue on this topic and pick up on where I left (hoping that nobody minds it), but at least the album thing isn't as pressing at the moment.

[Functional]

No artist can afford all this, especially marketing. So you can see why it's a group with a show that gets signed.

Indeed. However, we don't probably want to really market ourselves for ideological reasons at least in traditional ways. I think for us it's going to be more about live shows and hope we get attention from there. We won't even have our social webpage in Facebook for these reasons. So I guess what this sums up to is that actually record labels won't probably be interested in us at all unless we manage to somehow get attention through our own terms.

So yer not really a musician, that's not novel, you (the label hires em, even to make the record. That's less necessary with DAW product obviously.

I donno anymore. I never bought an album that was just whatever, collected. Even the Monkees' albums were cohesive works. That used the cream o' the crop of LA studio players.

Well, god knows, maybe we can pull off something? It's still two of us and I think the focus will be on the singer herself, whereas I'll be more in the background. In the long run, I'd want to learn how to play either guitar and/or bass myself, but for a makeshift solution I could imagine doing drums on MPC or something like that. I think that's actually quite common, but I'm not entirely certain. Still, I'm confident that we can get a show running due to the theatrical background. And we could consult many brilliant people for that should we want to do so.

Regarding albums, if / once you have the time and perhaps happen to be interested, you could take a peek at A/T/O/S self-titled album. Personally to me, this feels like a cohesive work. Perhaps you might feel that way as well? However, as it is right now, stylistically they aren't jumping here and there, unlike us. But AFAIK, their live setup is drumpad + singer herself. Might be wrong on this, but that's what I got from couple of videos.

Fantasma by Cornelius is a wonderful example of a record that's stylistically all over the place yet comes together as an album length work.

Interesting album. I think so too. I guess once we're ready we should indeed just instead approach the question by building the whole album instead. Sequencing is probably going to be pointless for us (for now), if we opt in to Soundcloud at least, because we can just release singles. I just want to get away from that practice in the end because it sort of screams for that cheesiness. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I associate releasing only singles as sort of "hi, I just started doing EDM" -thing.

Another interesting thing that comes in my mind from that Fantasma album (though there weren't any unambiguous examples of this) is that a song can in itself have quite a huge stylistic change on its course, which can help to set floor to another style. We have actually one track that is like this. Hard to describe it, but I programmed a rather anxious sounding synth with a band reject filter that I modulate with velocity-value. It plays monotonously through the track to build up for the final relief, which... well, turns into this kind of jazzy thing with pan drum chords & melody, some humming and sort of intimate background percussion alongside with jazzy drums. So a track like this could connect two different styles, perhaps?

Each song can have quality as much as you want, but because it's a circus they cancel each other out.

We don't stick to genre templates that hard and categorically speaking I don't think it really matters unless you do stick with genre templates heavily. Ironically enough, it's actually the reason why I can't stand to most d&b anymore — because to my ears it's all about the same template with the same rhythm. So yes, you like the music template, obviously it's a safe bet if you listen to music done by the same template. Now try instead listening to instra:mental or ASC (autonomic d&b). Template isn't there anymore in majority of the songs. it doesn't work anymore like that. You might hate the style of one song and love the style of another song, even though it's within the same "genre".

Lot of newer genres are like that. In "post-genre world" you have stuff like witch house, which holds a huge variety of styles within itself. It's more about the aesthetics and just some small shared ground (such as 808 drums) between the songs. Sometimes not even that much. Some songs are more like memphis rap, some songs are more like synthpop, some songs are more like dark trap.They just decide to call themselves witch house to get associated with a scene they like. And witch house has nothing to do with house, even though the name implies so.

House, techno, dubstep etc. it's not really THAT drastic style change

Sure, it's not to people who don't care about these musical styles. But for people who do, oh boy. Dubstep in particular is a genre like this, because it's very, very loose and can mean a lot of different things. You have grimy sort of dubstep such as Mesck. Then you have more traditional dubstep you can find in Deep Medi, like for example Mala. Then you have the "brostep" variant which gets a lot of hate from fans of the former ones, you can find that by searching "Monstercat dubstep" for example. Is it only the purists? No, you can clear a whole dancefloor empty just by switching from the brostep variant to the grimy variant. Suddenly people stop dancing.

And on the offchance of coming off as a prick (I'll risk it), I have to mention that I never said anything about house or techno. Witch house has nothing actually to do with house music despite the name (it just sounds better than rapegaze, which unfortunately some people initially took bit too seriously as name for a genre). Dub techno has some common ground with techno but for the most part it's the kind of music you could play if you really needed to clear the dancefloor. We aren't actually into dance music at all.

While many would argue (reasonably so) that we are moving to a post-genre world or already inhabit in one, genres are still common reference point and helpful for discussion of music. I don't like how either you talk of genres and come across as a person who is pedantic about categorization or you don't talk about them at all. Can't we have a middle ground?

But the difference between house, techno and dubstep IS equal to difference between classic jazz, country and death metal. Just because the latter two make extensive use of guitar doesn't make them any similiar.

I must detest here a bit. Though I agree on the last point, I still would say that it's almost meaningless to draw comparisons in terms of difference between genres like that. Only god can truly tell what is and how much different. But as you implied, the dance floor audience will tell you that there is a clear difference from the perspective of your listeners. And that's most important point.

[incubus]

"It is not the way to stick with a genre. Others have tried"



"They tried and failed?"



"They tried and DIED!"

[xoxos]

zip ties.

[Functional]

Ha, good news.

Due to recent developments, it seems that we will actually be employing guitars (acoustic & electronic) & bass guitar. I've been recently experimenting with Orange Tree Samples Evolution Steel Strings guitar + Cubase own amp plugin with amazing results. And given the lovely expression capabilities of guitars (esp. with pedals), can't really get my mind off that idea anymore. Though obviously learning guitar takes practice, but the stuff I've wrote so far is voiced properly.

So I guess that will also solve to some extent our live problems. But it will still be bit odd that we won't have a drummer nor a keyboard player. Or possibly third bass/guitar player. But meh, whatever.

Here's the actual culprit behind "recent developments", which made me experiment further.