Musical shortcuts - How far do you go without guilty conscience?

[AdvancedFollower]

It's possible to make a song that sounds very derivative and unoriginal even if you created all the patches, MIDI, recordings etc. yourself from scratch. You basically just copy+paste from that song your heard, into your brain, and then from your brain into the DAW. It's still copy+paste, just with an extra step. IMHO, what matters is the final result, not how you got there.

[stonestreet]

My take on this music thing is that it is like the Ourborous. Some of us prefer to keep our head stuffed up our own arse and some of us stuff our head up somebody elses arse. You can get some good shit either way however I think the second option is more likely to give expanded shit.

Some man in mid-20 century america must have thought that speaking the same language was cheating. He had a language of his own. He ended up in a psyc hospital and for 3 years the main man studied this chap and his ramblings in this unknown language. Something happened I can not remember the details and this bloke started to speak english again. When asked why he had been the way he was I think he said it was about not getting respect.

It's a social thing

[IncarnateX]

Know what collegues? I am getting closer to a compromise that don’t necessarily imply an “anything goes” stand. This evening, I tested my conscience on the options of Korg Karma once again. Found out that I do not really mind the arp auto variations; it is like composing together with a machine that constantly suggests variations and rephrases. Fair enough.

However, the auto drums remind me a little too much of plain autoarrangement. Patterns are fixed, do not have many random variations and cannot be reprogrammed unless I buy the supplying Karma software for PC and I do not have patience to dive into the complexity of Karma tech just to program some semi-random drums.

So tomorrow I will buy a Beatstep Pro for drums instead. It has probability control like Analog Keys, which will give me a little more ownership than Karmas autoarrangements. Thus, Karma for arps and leads and maybe some chords now and then. Analog Keys for bass, noices and other voices and Beatstep pro will control the drum channel of my Fantom G, where I have all my favorite drum and effect kits ready. I like this feeling much better. Karma has its place but will not be such a main player as I first imagined.
Yeah

[justin3am]

So tommorow I will buy a Beatstep Pro for drums instead. It has probability control like Analog Keys...

It's not like the conditional trigs at all. On the BeatStep Pro, there is a Randomness and a Probability control, which work globally or on a per sequencer track basis. You cannot control probability per-step or even per drum channel. The down side of this is that drum channels which you don't want to trigger randomly need to be muted and on the Sequencer 1 and 2 tracks, you need to make sure that each step is programmed to do something useful, as you can't tell it not to trigger steps.

I really wish there were a sequencer which took a 'both approach' to this. That way, you could set per step probability, then have a global control which scaled the amount of randomness applied to the steps which are configured to trigger on probability conditions. As it is, Elektron's method is difficult to scale, when you want more randomization without having to adjust each step, where Arturia's method makes it more difficult to get controlled randomization.

To get the best of both, I use both.

[IncarnateX]

The down side of this is that drum channels which you don't want to trigger randomly need to be muted

But I do want to trigger the drums a tiny randomly. Saw a vid where it was demonstrated by setting rand og prob fairly low. I am aware that rand and prob are not triggered per step but if that is needed, Analog Keys is right at hand. If I need steady drum voices, they are not going to be controlled from Beatstep. So it is ok that rand and prob apply to the whole drum track. Analog keys does not do randomization, so there will still be some alternative possibilities when using Beatstep.

[jancivil]

Some man in mid-20 century america must have thought that speaking the same language was cheating.

Yesterday evening I saw a film of an interview with John Cage where he went into his views on sound, finding sound wherever you go; the comparison he drew was he perceived most music as someone trying to say something while noise isn't trying to say anything: <it isn't trying to pretend it's in love with another sound>

So in the 20th century music became less rhetorical in construction. I'm interested less in the rhetoric of form as we have it from classical music in favor of the sound communicating something I would personally find false to analogize as talking. At the same time, though, I'm very interested in speech as rhythm; to abstract it from meaning while seeing what there is in terms of the energy of it in motion, in flow. Or even the intent, the emotion found in the way the rhythm is working, the emphases and so forth.

I found the analogy of psychosis versus going back to regular English not useful, personally. Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

[vurt]

Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

no point either, its been done.
i got told at school "that's wrong" "you cant do that!"
now i don't have any one at all to reign me in!!! so now i do what makes me happy.

[vurt]

creative endeavours are probably the last bastion of true freedom, throw of the shackles of conformity and peoples expectations!
power to the people!!!

[jancivil]

Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

no point either, its been done.
i got told at school "that's wrong" "you cant do that!"
now i don't have any one at all to reign me in!!! so now i do what makes me happy.

Absolutely. Except in beginning, one may find what's been done of use. Ultimately, when I decided I was fit to compose my own music, the idea was my own music. Here people seem to want influences and the fact one is probably using extant instruments to erase the idea one may individuate as a creator of music.

<You didn't build the guitar so you're a fraud if you dare say you're original> reduces the issue to absurdity but to what use? Let's turn that on its head: if all you can do is a xerox of what someone else does, how is it that you're not a replicant? What makes you an individual at all?

Actually back at my first actual school, I took a fair amount of LSD. I had a sort of best friend there, from my hometown and naborhood, and we tripped together a number of times. We developed this theory - and the thing about this is, we had independently grown to have this sense - regarding people that could not manage to come up with an original notion, I mean that wasn't a reiteration of someone else's thought. Parroting it.
And as you interrogate that sort of person you hit a wall with them.

[vurt]

Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

no point either, its been done.
i got told at school "that's wrong" "you cant do that!"
now i don't have any one at all to reign me in!!! so now i do what makes me happy.

Absolutely. Except in beginning, one may find what's been done of use. Ultimately, when I decided I was fit to compose my own music, the idea was my own music.

well yes, you need some sort of chops. otherwise you can have all the ideas in the world but no way of expressing them.

i was following on from the analogy, sorry.

knowing english (having the musical vocabulary)
pyschosis (losing the vocab)
end psychosis (having all that experimental stuff in your head from the psychosis, but choosing to write banal repetition, because you know people like it...)


im high and over stretched someone elses metaphor

[jancivil]

- as to that reduction to absurdity, it is passing difficult to truly and honestly feature oneself as having done something that has no influence from the outside world at all. Purely original, it doesn't happen. So this particular gesture is useless, we're already there, there's no point to it. The idea is one can individuate in favor of straight replication.

Schoenberg's dodecaphony, for instance. He said many times that he never quite removed himself from his background and training in harmony. The author of 'Structural Functions of Harmony' developed serial dodecaphony. And this is not paradoxical really; it was a choice to create a logical framework for further investigation of the given set, 12 tones.

[jancivil]

Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

no point either, its been done.

Absolutely. Except in beginning, one may find what's been done of use. Ultimately, when I decided I was fit to compose my own music, the idea was my own music.

well yes, you need some sort of chops. otherwise you can have all the ideas in the world but no way of expressing them.

The argument to absurdity here [re: lack of chops] may be represented by The Shaggs.

I'm interested now: does having a lot of ideas need to be grounded in extant ideas? Or really the execution of musical ideas: doesn't one need to be able?
This is not a simple matter.

[vurt]

Music as conforming to what everybody else finds immediately comprehensible, I suppose. Nah, tiresome, conservative, dull to me.

no point either, its been done.

Absolutely. Except in beginning, one may find what's been done of use. Ultimately, when I decided I was fit to compose my own music, the idea was my own music.

well yes, you need some sort of chops. otherwise you can have all the ideas in the world but no way of expressing them.

The argument to absurdity here [re: lack of chops] may be represented by The Shaggs.

I'm interested now: does having a lot of ideas need to be grounded in extant ideas? Or really the execution of musical ideas: doesn't one need to be able?
This is not a simple matter.

joe meek too, he had some great ideas for catchy riffs, needed someone else to make a tune out of them though.
i think as a species we all have music in us, were just not sure how to express it. in the right venue though you can encourage people who have never done more than first year recorder at school (we had to do that) then nothing, to pick up simple percussion instrument and find a rhythm. even something so simple can be a release for some people.
harmony and melody are a little more difficult to get right with this kind of set up, but that gareth malone feller seems to do ok going in to small towns and building a choir. so its possible if youre willing to spend just a little time.

[jancivil]

losing the musical vocabulary

I have not lost it, I just do not want to waste my time replicating the bits for consumption. It does become more difficult to even imagine restricting myself to it. Except, you know, pentatonic rock licks and the good stupid.
Been there done that, though.

At the time I did really get into study of music, I became interested in extending vocabulary, and I thought of it in this very term. The procedures in 20th century art music. I found the Persichetti text "20th Century Harmony" and hung out a bit with jazz people while I was entrenched in chromatic harmony exercise.

Perhaps paradoxically, the more lingo you speaky, the further you may go in creating new pathways.
A big thing for me is the realization (this comes early, bending strings, or say having no frets) that there is no 12-tones and that's it, it's a continuum which may as well be infinite.

[vurt]

ps: the shaggs were the exception that proves the rule. that's a great album!

i guess they where channelling foot foot, cats know.