Tuesday, July 29, 2014

yeah. i'm just going to tune by ear to separately produce each section, and glue it all together. it'll sound "out of tune" to some people, but the physics are a little too complex to make such a simplistic statement - it's going to be staggered by quartertones and eighthtones throughout, but that's only "out of tune" relative to the obsolete theory that is still entrenched in western academic thought. it's going to be pretty much impossible to reproduce live without multiple guitarists and a set of techs with perfect pitch, but so be it. it's not in the plans, anyways.

so, this is going to be rather tonally complex. good luck transcribing it....

there's only one popular rock band that i'm aware of that made excellent use of microtones in an otherwise tonal context: alice in chains. you can hear it in more avant stuff like swans or sonic youth, but it's not in the same pop context.

specifically, it's the vocal harmonies, which were often just off. again: people think it sounds out of tune and either like it because of that or cringe because of that. tbh, i don't think either staley or cantrell really realized what they were doing, for the precise reason that their new singer hits the notes perfectly. that is, william duvall is a more proficient singer, but, by being a more technically perfect singer, he loses the aspect of the band that initially made them so interesting. i kind of wish some music theory guru would sit cantrell down and explain it to him, but it's also not the same thing to train somebody to pick up a level of chemistry that came through intuition.

i *do* think staley had an intuition for hitting the notes in between, though. like, when staley and cantrell harmonized, staley would often be off by a microtone and would consistently hit the point out of tune because it sounded more "right" to him. in order for that to work the way it does, he has to be accidentally producing perfect overtones. that's why what they had was so special: he was intuitively producing something that exists outside of western music theory, without really realizing he was doing it.

this isn't going to sound like an alice in chains song, but that's the only popular rock band i'm aware of that played with these ideas within the context of popular rock music, accidentally or not.