is that who that is? I just figured if I searched youtube for music and banging rocks together I would find somethingdo_androids_dream wrote:I miss filthy frank a lot..Hink wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnU_x2ZAi-g
Zappa had often deep wisdom in his words - perhaps not the "whole truth", but here he really saw what was coming. This comment is from 80-90's, the situation in 2018 is now ten times worse.Hink wrote:do_androids_dream wrote:But thanks for the reminder because a little over a week ago I posted this in the zappa thread, Frank Zappa kind of this subject talking about listening to "experts"Hink wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnU_x2ZAi-g
https://www.facebook.com/happymagtv/vid ... 19619/?t=2
Please yourself yes, but don't fall into a trap of thinking you can't make improvements in your music. In my early attempts I was just improvising around, doing what I liked. Now, I hear how amateurish it was, where melody is wandering around undeveloped, no real song form, abrupt tempo changes I thought had impact. Not really. Did what I liked though. But it wasn't good.MadDogE134 wrote:maybe i just don't understand people. music or any art for that matter is a gift given to you. it is for you. you should do it to please yourself and you alone. now if others can appreciate it then it is shared... but if you feel the 'need' to share then that 'need' is nothing more than an ego or a self esteem problem. if you please yourself then that is the point for which it was given. if others find value it in then it is a shared gift. bottom line is... please yourself. you can create the best possible thing and there will STILL be those that don't appreciate it or like it. don't base your self worth on others... they will ultimately let you down. it is a spiritual thing. cheers
Mike777 wrote:Please yourself yes, but don't fall into a trap of thinking you can't make improvements in your music. In my early attempts I was just improvising around, doing what I liked. Now, I hear how amateurish it was, where melody is wandering around undeveloped, no real song form, abrupt tempo changes I thought had impact. Not really. Did what I liked though. But it wasn't good.MadDogE134 wrote:maybe i just don't understand people. music or any art for that matter is a gift given to you. it is for you. you should do it to please yourself and you alone. now if others can appreciate it then it is shared... but if you feel the 'need' to share then that 'need' is nothing more than an ego or a self esteem problem. if you please yourself then that is the point for which it was given. if others find value it in then it is a shared gift. bottom line is... please yourself. you can create the best possible thing and there will STILL be those that don't appreciate it or like it. don't base your self worth on others... they will ultimately let you down. it is a spiritual thing. cheers
Sure, a great producer can make a good song sound better. But I think "Yesterday" would still have been a hit without the string quartet. And they've released some 'raw' Beatles studio recordings, without the wall-of-sound production, and I like them a lot because the songs and performing are very good. No fancy wall-of-sound, but still very good music. The raw takes are not polished, and sound like a band in a garage, and there are more talented performers today everywhere. But it's the quality of song writing. The label knew that and spent whatever it took in the studio to polish the songs for marketing. And while the final recordings were studio professional, it was the music that made it sell.JJ_Jettflow wrote:...
I think anytime you have a hit song from a signed band, you have to realize there are alot of people helping them behind the scenes. It was George Martin's idea to use the string quartet in "Yeserday" which took a basic ballad and turned it into something unique.
Almost all singed artists will have people that pour over their songs, if they write them, making changes to increase it chances of being a hit...especiallly in pop/rock.
This is not to say these artists to not posess any talent, but having professionals help you certainly will make your songs more marketable and give those artists who go it alone and hope to achieve the same results a more difficult time of reaching their goal. It will also make it appear the pro artist is much more talented than the actually are.
there are a number of good songwriters on this forum , imho ...Mike777 wrote:Sure, a great producer can make a good song sound better. But I think "Yesterday" would still have been a hit without the string quartet. And they've released some 'raw' Beatles studio recordings, without the wall-of-sound production, and I like them a lot because the songs and performing are very good. No fancy wall-of-sound, but still very good music. The raw takes are not polished, and sound like a band in a garage, and there are more talented performers today everywhere. But it's the quality of song writing. The label knew that and spent whatever it took in the studio to polish the songs for marketing. And while the final recordings were studio professional, it was the music that made it sell.JJ_Jettflow wrote:...
I think anytime you have a hit song from a signed band, you have to realize there are alot of people helping them behind the scenes. It was George Martin's idea to use the string quartet in "Yeserday" which took a basic ballad and turned it into something unique.
Almost all singed artists will have people that pour over their songs, if they write them, making changes to increase it chances of being a hit...especiallly in pop/rock.
This is not to say these artists to not posess any talent, but having professionals help you certainly will make your songs more marketable and give those artists who go it alone and hope to achieve the same results a more difficult time of reaching their goal. It will also make it appear the pro artist is much more talented than the actually are.
We have every sound and recording tool available the Beatles had and lots more. Any musical sound we want to make we can. We have unlimited multi-track in our bedrooms. With all these tools at our disposal, it matters little if the music is just ok.
Everyone's becoming a great producer at home. Many are great performers. Very few are great writers.
You can find many amateur songwriters online, and on youtube. I care less about production then I do the music. If it's just vocal/piano or guitar, that's ok. Many just perform on their smart phones or PC mics. If the music is good, that's ok with me. Some have great vocals, some great technique. And very few write great music.
I hope one day I'll find an unsigned songwriter on youtube with a new song about as good as "Yesterday". Have not yet. Most amateur songs lack melodic appeal because the vocal melody will hang around a few notes bar after bar. They might have good voices and lyrics, and they worked hard on that. But you know they didn't work as hard on the music writing.
Ghettosynth, I would live to do a detailed quote-and-parry with this, but my only internet access is on my phone, and long, complex series of quotes are really difficult and annoying to attempt on a phone.ghettosynth wrote:Scholarly's a little heavy, it applies to things that can be measured, wait for it, objectively. My farts are probably objectively louder than yours, for example, assuming, of course, that I lift a cheek first.herodotus wrote:No. Objectivity is a scholarly standard that simply doesn't apply to judgements of taste. I don't believe in objective reasons for aesthetic preferences any more than I believe that I love my Wife for objective reasons. I can find objective justifications for why it was a good idea to marry my Wife, but it would be a lie to say these justifications were the reason I proposed to her. We, or at least I, don't fall in love over a laundry list of fine qualities.ghettosynth wrote:I like how objective becomes "standards" when it becomes clear that it's rather challenging to define an objective measure of music.herodotus wrote:I have never called any music either 'good' or 'bad' in a public context such as kvr. It doesn't make sense to me. Such a simple dichotomy is too blunt a tool to categorize the many varieties of musical experience.
I will say, though, that there is something rather tendentious in the way many people people use the difficulties involved in applying this dichotomy to music.
The fact that neither J. S. Bach nor Lil Wayne can be said to 'objectively good' or 'objectively bad' doesn't make them equal. It isnt a clever critique of musical standards nor is it a demonstration of the impossibility of such standards. In fact it doesnt really tell us much of anything about anything except how useless these words are for describing or discussing music.
Even play requires definition before it can be an objective standard. Probably everyone can play the solo to "I want to be sedated" in some key on the piano.But for the rest, the objective standards I am talking about are not on the grand scale of love or beauty. They are practical matters, of practical import. One objective standard would be
"Can you, or can you not play this part?"
I think that it's even challenging to come up with an objective measure of "play a part" that will past muster even assuming that the part is "perfectly" notated, if that's even possible. Given that, you are still going to have to aggregate how well notes are played across many notes and here all of the limitations of aggregation will come into play. Moreover, which is better, the person that perfectly replicates the perfect score, or the person who plays it with the feeling that you think best fits the song. Now, how do you objectively define that?
No doubt, but now we're talking the objective measurement of a player's ability to replicate parts in a given style.This is something that I ran up against over and over again when trying to work in bands. Some people learn parts faster than other people. Like, a lot faster. Some people hear an unfamiliar scale or an unfamiliar rhythmic figure, listen to it 3 or 4 times, and know how to work with it. Some people never quite seem to learn.
Not so fast, it isn't an objective standard of the music, and two bandleaders might have two different opinions over which of two players is most appropriate for the same style of music. I'm not saying that with sufficient effort you could develop an objective standard of "player skill", we do have algorithms that asses this to some degree today, but you're not there yet and it has nothing to do with whether or not music A is objectively better than music B.So that is an objective standard. I would call the ability to learn unfamiliar music quickly a 'skill'. But you could call it a 'defect' and the quality of learning quickly would have the same practical outcome.
I certainly think that we can subjectively rank players in very strong terms, having auditioned bandmates myself, and I suspect that we can take a few very simple input parameters to build a reasonable predictive model, e.g., years of training, years of experience, number of records sold, number of bands performed in, number of shows, total dollars earned from shows, unique number of styles, etc.
The problem with models like this is that they lack ground truth and so there we are, back to subjective measurement. Anything you choose as a response is either a proxy for talent or a subjective evaluation. You can validate these kinds of models against subjective assessment and, in fact, that's often how it's done. See, for example, papers that talk about automated mixing and mastering. But once you've done that, you're training a model against collective experience and that that's all your objectivity measures.
See above, you're getting warmer but you've not yet established an objective measure of "music", at all. Music doesn't need to be "played" by a "player" at all, in fact, it doesn't even need to be played to exist.See above, "Can you, or can you not play this part?"To assert that they are not equal requires that you have framework that can support the notion of equality in the first place, you don't. You haven't even established a partial ordering of any form.
I'm talking about objective measurement of music. That music A of arbitrary genre/style is greater than music B of arbitrary genre/style. That is the claim on offer here. That there exists music that is objectively better than other music. We even have a predictable example, some violin piece is (predictably) better than some pop piece, usually some rap piece.Academic references are wonderful, but in the realm of musical learning there are very few studies concerning the practical skills of practicing musicians.I would think that those of you that interested in "standards" would have academic references to back up your point of view.
No, it's nothing like that at all. We can easily find data to support that thesis. I get that most of you don't want to do the work, but perhaps you should consider that before being so sure.Sort of like how I don't have a single study proving the statement that "you can't use a garden spade to dig up a concrete driveway", but I feel quite certain that it's true.
However, that test exists in an ad-hoc sense and will determine your acceptance among a different set of peers. You may believe what you will, and I may even agree with you, but you are not closer with that belief to an objective standard of which is more "exacting."herodotus wrote:
Ghettosynth, I would live to do a detailed quote-and-parry with this, but my only internet access is on my phone, and long, complex series of quotes are really difficult and annoying to attempt on a phone.
I will limit myself to a handful of points.
1. When I wrote of standards, I was referring to performance standards. The most obvious examples of this are the tests used at Juilliard and Berkeley and other schools to determine whether you win a contest or get a degree in piano performance or guitar performance and the like. I used Bach as an example because his pieces are famously difficult to perform, and often serve as a test of advanced performance ability. Lil Wayne's music, on the other hand, doesn't seem anywhere near as exacting to perform.
Fair enough, but my point was more about the challenge of identifying an objective standard. I grant you that it's relatively easy to define a gross objective standard for "can you play this part.", see Rock Band 3 with advanced controller. I thought that I had actually mentioned this in some sense but it appears that I gave it the axe before posting. I talk too much as it is, so be grateful for my heavy editing hand. Given that gross standard, however, it then becomes rather subjective as to who can play it better, i.e., who is the better performer. Moreover, the standard of who can play this part is not precise enough that all may agree that it, in fact, measures who can play this part. How much of the notated nuance, or, in the case of only an audio recording in lieu of score, the played nuance is necessary for "can play this part."3. The question of whether or not someone can play a part is nowhere near as complex as you are making it out to be. All of the factors you mention, of whether the performer plays it with machine like notated accuracy, or with emotion and elegance and so on, are nuances in the performances of people who can all ACTUALLY PLAY THE PART.
All of these questions have some academic material to back up thoughts, you do have to have the right google foo to find them as well as the right skill to put them in the proper context. That said, my challenge of scholarly study was more about the inference that some art is objectively better than other art.Now I don't know of any academic studies proving that some people can't play some parts. I also don't of any academic studies proving that some people can't spell some words.
and now you have auto tune and everyone thinks they can sing which is even harder to do than play an instrument. when it comes to singing... it is far easier to sing along with notes being played but very few can actually sing acapella... you have to hear the notes in your head before they come out of your mouth and that goes back to those guitarists that can't tell they're out of tune. like back when i was playing in marching band at school... many could play a trumpet due to 'fixed' positions. all they had to do is form their mouths correctly and then could play technically but very few could play the trombone 'cos you had to hear the notes and stop the slide along with mouthing the mouth piece. 
Yes, we call that subjectivity, emphasis mine.jancivil wrote: It's as some politician or cop or somebody said about obscenity. You know it when you see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_itThe phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.[1][2][3] In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored...
When you said this I thought, he writes hit pop songs but that really doesn't require a study of music theory. But I remembered we wrote a complete opera type work for full orchestra and choir, "Liverpool Oratorio" (1991).jancivil wrote:... For instance: Paul McCartney doesn't have any interest in music theory or academic talk. He bloody well knows what he's doing. There are all kinds of people in music like this, but there's one that easily came to mind.
..
"... he writes hit pop songs but that really doesn't require a study of music theory".Mike777 wrote:When you said this I thought, he writes hit pop songs but that really doesn't require a study of music theory. But I remembered we wrote a complete opera type work for full orchestra and choir, "Liverpool Oratorio" (1991).jancivil wrote:... For instance: Paul McCartney doesn't have any interest in music theory or academic talk. He bloody well knows what he's doing. There are all kinds of people in music like this, but there's one that easily came to mind.
..
You have to know what you are doing to write a complex work for full orchestra and choir. So I found the documentary of making the work, and found it was written with Carl Davis, an American conductor/composer. And in the documentary it shows the two at work composing and it's not McCartney at the piano, it's Davis at piano writing on a score as McCartney sings to him the song and lyrics. McCartney wrote the tunes, but it was Davis that scored it for orchestra, choir, and professional opera singers, one being Kiri Te Kanawa.
The work was a commercial success but not well received by critics who found the work too simplistic and too long. In other words, critics found it not so 'good'. I've heard parts of it and some is ok, but it doesn't hold my interest very much. I agree with the critics.
When it came out, and heard McCartney had written on opera type work, I thought wow this might be something. I didn't care for it then, and still don't. They should have made it a rock-opera type work, not classical oratorio.
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