what's your autodidactic focus in music?

[xoxos]

@xoxos I’m not sure the refusal to accept help from those who came before you and have learned a thing or two has served you well.

the welsh child plays one finger upon the lips when presented with the precedent works of man. blewm.

its served others even less

there is so much stuff at low levels in negativland's U2. none of it uses chord theory. no stone temple pilot or debbie gibson fan is ever going to hear it. it took me 3 decades to hear the low stuff in damon edge's blood on the moon and eyes of the zombie king period. alain jourgensen's t'witch is his least mentioned album and says anything i'd ever have to say best the first time. perhaps if we discretise my person as an antimusician, intending to reclaim and refine human attention from distribution, my involvement with music and total disregard for "musical" criteria is clearer. while i agree this translates to more than "a weak spot", there are other factors in distribution which far exceed skill.

my personal (dearth of) musical achievements isn't really on topic here, i spent years making recordings of synthesizers without being concerned that it didn't have much to do with music, and haven't been teh sam since if i'd known then, perhaps i'd balk at being so synth demo focused, but the way it happened is the cosmic order so that's alright. can't say i've gotten everything out of recording i might have thought i wanted but my understanding of what that is modulated tastefully, graciously.

[xoxos]

one more reflection on thread,

dang are my generation fortunate. 80s had an explosion of vaguely accessible experimental culture (eg. AMOK bookshop in los angeles). throbbing gristle nurse with wound and we only had to wait a couple of years for s1000 revolution and then computer music. so many aural textures, so little categorisation.

there's a couple of us on here (i used to think it was all of us, but i saw how most people weren't lsitening) ... can't remember which underground comic had a bit about "music in teh future will be a tape of your aunty clipping her toenails" ... c. 1991 someone popped a 10 minute tape loop of a 1 bar drum machine through massive distortion. you could sit there and listen to this shit for an hour. the residents eskimo, or mark of the mole on acid. talk about food priority.

psychic tv.. their "acid hut" release i've never seen online.

chords and rhythms, a little part of me wants to die every time. they always have those bands on the television shows introducing guests. why not someone like vurt. isn't it that all of us are doing new music because we can't bloody stand a limp one up our backsides being told its teh funk? no. most people make music for authority. freaks are rarer than people who pretend to be freaks to fcuk with the freaks.

[deastman]

My own musical output has been pretty scarce over the years, because reasons. And you and I have similar tastes in a lot of areas. Still have my original CD of Negativland’s U2. Twitch was the best Ministry by far. It hardly matters. These groups are about deconstruction of music, about exploring the edges of is and isn’t considered music, reducing it to the essential “organized sound” classification. None of that voids what I said earlier. If you do speed up periodic oscillations into the audible range, you’ve got tone, melody, and harmony. Different cultures may have different approaches to divisions of those tones per octave, but you can’t say that you haven’t been influenced in any way, shape, or form by inadvertent exposure to western music theory.

As for my autodidactic experience, I suppose synthesis is something which I’ve never received any formal training in. I can recall bringing home my shiny new DW-6000 and having absolutely no clue what any of those parameters did. Didn’t know what an oscillator was, or a filter or an envelope. Mostly I had to figure it out on my own over time, with an occasional breadcrumb picked up from Keyboard magazine.

[vurt]

chords and rhythms, a little part of me wants to die every time. they always have those bands on the television shows introducing guests. why not someone like vurt.

you've seen my face, even younger it wasn't exactly a face for tv

[vurt]

dunno what chords and rhythms is? some tv show over there?
also, i don't know what it was called over here, but id never heard of "holy f**k" before i saw them on some late night show i accidentally found flicking the channels one night
some years ago now, was still married, but it was around the time of their first album.
and theyre not your run of the mill "band" although there is that aspect, theres also the guy doing the tape and delay manipulations, pretty good stuff, especially live, they can jam on a loop for a while, can get pretty "trancey" in the shamanic sense rather than edm.

[vurt]

Different cultures may have different approaches to divisions of those tones per octave, but you can’t say that you haven’t been influenced in any way, shape, or form by inadvertent exposure to western music theory.

id have to agree with this.
we are the sum of all our experiences, even if you only heard that one pop song that one time, its influencing you even now. its a reference point, for some its a thing to aim for, for others its a thing to try to be as far away as possible, but its there.

[Forgotten]

What I really don't get is the people who want to do nothing more than ape the acts they listen to on a daily basis, or make the statement that they make <insert very limited genre here> music.

I always think of music as a big melting pot, and my journey has been to learn a number of different instruments, learn some theory, make some noise, play live, program music, use physical instruments, synth hardware, computers, tablets, etc.

When I was a kid I watched my grandfather play piano, and figured out a few melodies on my own. My brother got a classical guitar for Christmas one year and didn't really play it, so I learned a little of it. When I was 16 I bought an electric guitar and that's when I really started to learn to play something relatively well. I also started playing tenor sax, but didn't like how cumbersome it was (later I got back to sax but switched to alto). From the start I picked up theory, but that's been an ongoing journey and I can take it or leave it. All of it is good input and hopefully it leads to some relatively varied output.

[xoxos]

What I really don't get is the people who want to do nothing more than ape the acts they listen to on a daily basis, or make the statement that they make <insert very limited genre here> music.

because the singer is an advocate for what the world lacks, but surely wouldn't if only all the people would listen to my lovely acoustic guitar strumming.

[Hink]

What I really don't get is the people who want to do nothing more than ape the acts they listen to on a daily basis, or make the statement that they make <insert very limited genre here> music.

I always think of music as a big melting pot, and my journey has been to learn a number of different instruments, learn some theory, make some noise, play live, program music, use physical instruments, synth hardware, computers, tablets, etc.

When I was a kid I watched my grandfather play piano, and figured out a few melodies on my own. My brother got a classical guitar for Christmas one year and didn't really play it, so I learned a little of it. When I was 16 I bought an electric guitar and that's when I really started to learn to play something relatively well. I also started playing tenor sax, but didn't like how cumbersome it was (later I got back to sax but switched to alto). From the start I picked up theory, but that's been an ongoing journey and I can take it or leave it. All of it is good input and hopefully it leads to some relatively varied output.

I think this kind of theme is going to quite common, I started out with a trumpet in school in 5th grade so my 1st journey into music was with basic theory and though I wasn't very good I stuck with it for 4 years while picking up guitar. My mother insisted on the local music family teaching me guitar, and that was with the melbay series books, so still learning with included with theory. In college I took a theory class one semester as well, plus my own studies means I'm not theory illiterate but I will confess ignorance in areas that could use improvement.

When I talk about recording and my beginnings I mean with music and more of the days of multi track, but my attention was grabbed long before I ever even did the two deck mud bouncing crap. In 7th grade (71 I think) a teacher brought in a reel to reel tape machine, made an echoe and for some reason that grabbed me. My xmas list had r2r on it every year after, never got one but I had one of those portabe cassette recorders, my dad bought me a nice 8track (cartridge not multi track) recorder and I knew then I wanted more, I wanted to go deeper than setting vu meters.

Guitar, technology and audio recording were all on perfect courses blending smoothly for me.

[xoxos]

because reasons.

following "inevitable aging related events" i increased my study of astrology. persons new here may note that i've been on kvr "talking about myself" for a long time so it (and subsequency) isn't unexplored territory for me. as relevant events are generally behind me i'm alright with saying, "unsurprisingly" my chart is somewhat rarified in surplus of small angles. those which are considered beneficial correspond to my aptitudes (*which may not be perceptible to others due to a discriminating feature) and those which are considered detrimental correspond accordingly.. cazimi (an eg. "good") grand cross ("bad") with both majors ("ouch") jupiter and saturn. no expansion or contraction. if i specified the qualities this conversation would be buried off course.

the conventions of astrology articulate a conflict with authority as my majorly crossed cazimi in social justice aquarius opposing a point in god's gift to us all leo. tangible? no need for anyone to point out this is superstitious bs, "date verifiable" ppl in my life have lived and died, i've done the synastry, tighter than shit. and too sad to discuss. none of this translates to others but it is possibly perceptible as rationale for my lack of follow through on what might seem to be my objective/s.

eg. we generally have such different ideas about what music is in life that our scope of reference makes understanding what others are saying impossible. it doesn't seem pertinent until examining ppls wider conceptualisation (or deficit thereof fnar ive got a porsche).

but we're often good suckers seems to be the local constant

[xoxos]

"where roads are made i lose my way" guey :p

[Forgotten]

What I really don't get is the people who want to do nothing more than ape the acts they listen to on a daily basis, or make the statement that they make <insert very limited genre here> music.

because the singer is an advocate for what the world lacks, but surely wouldn't if only all the people would listen to my lovely acoustic guitar strumming.

I’m more talking about the people who ask “How do I make this bass sound” then produce a track that exactly mimicks the instrumentation they heard, or say they only make “Progressive Goa Uplifting Trance in A minor at 137.837564 BPM”.

There should be more to music than a focus on working within incredibly limiting parameters like that.

[vurt]

"where roads are made i lose my way" guey :p

where we're going we dont need no roads!

[Michael L]

But things like certain types of throat singing . You know its music when you hear it but it's totally off the radar as far as why is your brain automatically understanding that is music.

No, I think our brain (which constantly tries to find meaning in sounds) hears the rhythm, meter, tempo, pitch, melodic motifs, etc and thus recognises it as music in an unfamiliar genre (somewhere in http://everynoise.com).
Backatcha, here is my fave Inuit throat singer and Canadian pop star Tanya Tagaq:

205,000 YouTube views

[herodotus]

Musical time as a reification of arithmetic