i think you're almost making a valid point. i've picked up a few pieces that seem to sound roughly like this, but what you're doing is mistaking bad writers for a bad method. i would agree that the problem is compounded by the "academic establishment", who for some reason tend to pick out the worst of the bunch out of some kind of a desire for shock value. there's probably an underlying psychiatric condition that causes music teachers to hate the thing they cycle their life around. whether an expression of the ultraparadoxical or a reflection of self-loathing remains an open question in my mind, but it's gotta be something like that. it's some kind of rebellion, and that's something to cherish in principle if it doesn't always work out in practice. but, let's be blunt: this is a topic for two centuries ago. if you want to create interesting music in the 21st century, you can't be dragging the corpse of music theory around with you. holding on to music theory at this late a date is really something like holding on to creationism. or causality. pitches are mathematical objects. they exist in a continuum. any attempt to order that - be it through conventional music theory or tone rows - is just meaningless, oppressive structure.
the right way to look at it is that it's really just a question of tonal freedom. it's my composition, and i'll flat diminished if i want to, flat diminished if i want to....
the better side of it has a level of artistry that goes beyond the pretension. it just reduces to tension and release when you break it down to it's most basic. does it not seem foolhardy to restrict your emotional expression to a flawed mathematical relation? i think the best conventional composers have all understood this, and it's what really makes them stand out. standing on the other side of webern and cage just means coming to terms with it, without the hubris of pretending otherwise.
which is pretty pretentious, too.
but, i hear you - it's there, especially in the universities, and, sadly, they seem intent on upholding it.
as i expected, letting my hand heal a few days was a good move. i haven't slept in a few days, and i need to eat immediately, but, eyelids permitting, i may be able to get the electric version up by the end of the night.
i need another week for my fingernails for the classical version.
i've also decided to do an expressive version when i get around to filming myself. i mean, the piece is sort of robotic. and it's sort of ironic that the only scores i've ever not run ramshackle over are my own. i don't want to put the video up under pretensions of being a guitar hero or something. first, it's not challenging enough. second, fuck that nonsense, anyways. it's a nice piece. i'm an expressive player. i should play to my strengths.
but i do feel the need to get proper versions up first. like i said, it's going to be a bit, anyways, so i'd might as well have some fun with it.
so, i've uploaded those two files one last time. the bass wasn't coming across well on low end equipment, which is sort of essential stylistically. i had to cut the parts up and resequence them all, but it bounces now...
actually, i'm fighting with the bass. grargh.
i'm going to need to print some
more sheet music before i can record the live version, but it should
actually be relatively quick - i'm just replacing five guitar tracks,
and they're all short and relatively easy. i'll probably print them as
soon as this afternoon.
but i'm going to want to work
that reprise out first, probably. it'll be in it's own space on the
single and attached to the full version on jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj, which
will go to youtube as a 6-7 minute track, if i don't add a third section
(and i'm thinking i might).
i'm putting mixes together for "singles", but, ultimately, the thru mix is one of
two mirror images i'm working on. meaning this is this version's home.
meaning it's done, now.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 23, 2014 and updated on june 28, 2014.
this is the vst mix, which hooks up the constructed score to a series of vst instruments through the magic of midi sequencing and outputs the notes through various effects processors to create something approaching the
sound of a live band.
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 28, 2014 and updated later on that day.
this is getting close to a final mix of the renaissance guitar piece i've been orchestrating this month. it's arranged here in a heavy drum 'n' bass mix. so, play it through a subwoofer if you've got one. influences on this mix are of the warp records variety: aphex twin, autechre, squarepusher. keep in mind it was written and first imagined this way back in '01, when that sound was kind of winding down, and starting to morph into post-rock via tortoise and do make say think, which is also stylistically present in the mix. but i need to stress this is fundamentally renaissance music. i'm also trying to get a grungy guitar sound at points, which will come out clearer in the final mix with live guitars (the guitars here are played by a sample-based midi sequencer through some amp simulators - they sound good, but they're not live). the drums are also written with a heavy phil collins influence, of all things.
so, this is warp records + do make say think + phil collins + swans + renaissance music. an eclectic mix, i might say, that i'm sort of proud of. give it a listen....
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 28, 2014.
so, this is the mix i'll be chewing on over the next few days. specific points of issue are in the bass and the guitar tone. see, this is drum and bass, so i want the thick bottom end, but i want it a bit more organic sounding, because it's also renaissance music, so i'm going to have to play with things for a while. and i'm always fussing over guitar tone...
this is the vst version, though, rather than the live one. solely computers, here. live version will follow.
i also need to get back to practicing that classical and fingerpicking variety....
actually, i'm starting to think the thing with bandstand is that it's
purely sample based so it's stuttering out badly when it's not able to
find a sample that matches the note.
....meaning i'm driving it too hard.
which reduces to that it sucks. i mean, it needs to be able to do at least what my soundcard from 1997 can do.
and don't tell me i ought to have a quadcore with 40 gb of ram to emulate my soundcard from 1997. that's ridiculous.
i think the soundcard is 64 mb of ram. i dunno why they don't just build something that sits in ram.
but the drums sound fine, which is what i'm using it for, so i'll stop complaining.
bandstand sucks. i think it should be enough for the track, but i need to find a better way to render general midi through cubase. remarkably, you want to know what the most popular approach is on the internet? record to wave and import. which defeats the point of cubase.
bandstand seems to just be really, really bad at playing back notes. like, it just doesn't play the notes as they're written. there's one thing it's supposed to do....
and, i know it's the vsti because it works fine as soon as i switch it.
i acknowledge it may be the evaluation copy. regardless, i need to find another solution.
i'm kind of doing this the old fashioned way. people tend to use samplers or wave files in loops nowadays. nobody sits down and scores out drums for general midi, then tries to find a vsti that understands general midi over track 10.
i have two alesis dm5 drum heads that i'd expect should read the data, but i'd rather keep this particular project at a software level if i can
it's just a conceptual thing on keeping it in software.
well, jack white is almost 40, now. yeah, that's crazy, huh? so, i guess it's time to be more subtle and introspective and grown-up and all that other boring shit.
it'll happen to you, too.
</grandpa simpson>
on principle, it's not a bad thing if he wants to be a little more sophisticated. it's just that the nashville direction he's spinning in isn't going to sit well with a lot of the fans he's built up on the dirty garage/psych side of things, who'd rather hear his sophistication branch out in more of a tame impala direction (to use a contemporary act as a reference point). bluntly, a lot of us are probably going to finally trip the line with this and admit we're bored by it - not because it's "more sophisticated" but because it's just wandered too far out of our sphere of interest. the couple of mahavishnu romps seem forced. and, note that mahavishnu was not the sonics, huh?
and, that's fine. he doesn't need the cash. and we can all find something else to listen to. but, if he's smart, and he is, he'll find a way to better align his marketing apparatus with his musical future.
deathtokoalas
well, jack white still has the best tone ever in the history of guitars. man, that thing just squeals.
i'm going to interpret the rest of this as tongue-in-cheek, but i'm not really sure what the point of taking jsbx to as far of an ironic extreme as is possible really is....
ahmad almheiri
The guitar work is VERY similar to Led Zeppelin, but not nearly as good. But still a good song.
deathtokoalas
this particular track demonstrates an overall primary influence from john mclaughlin, rather than jimmy page. it's subtle, but trust me.
Justtryme90
I wish more people were influenced by Mclaughlin, Mahavishnu Orchestra are amazing.
deathtokoalas
well, it's easy to forget that it's also the case that john mclaughlin's biggest fan and primary protege was....jimmy page. he'd probably have spent the rest of his life doing session work for country musicians if mclaughlin didn't take him aside and show him a few things. but, the violin work here is very mahavishnu and the overall style is an update on the graham bond organization through a filter of jon spencer.
Ademga348
zepelin are shit band if you dont know
Thomas Haley
Zeppelin are one of the very first true Metal bands along with Sabbath. And Jimmy Page was one of the greatest guitarist ever.
deathtokoalas
but, the fact that they were early metal is why they were often a shit band. that being said,they did a few solid blues jams, and wrote a few proto-punk tunes. it's not all bad. but, most of it is...
ZGrep58
Just because a guitarist claims that his riff was stolen 40 YEARS after a massive hit was released does not mean it is true. The two songs sound faintly similar. If it was really stolen don't you think he would have noticed when it came out considering that Stairway was a massive hit?
deathtokoalas
just fwiw, these accusations of stairway being a rip are not new. i remember hearing about them when i was learning to play stairway in the early 90s (my guitar teacher at the time was a 60s/70s rock expert. he had me doing the blues classics: santana, zeppelin, hendrix. but he also had me doing some prog, like genesis. i started teaching myself nirvana, soundgarden, pumpkins, etc a few years later - and also some forgotten stuff like collective soul that had some tasty guitar playing. i think it was come as you are that got me first, but i remember spending a lot of time with superunknown and siamese dream, particularly.). i agree that it certainly took them long enough to file legal action, but it's not like nobody noticed.
further, page is known to have stolen many, many other riffs from early blues guitarists, as well as from john mclaughlin. and, that itself is really only contemptible in the context of how much money he made from it. the blues are not about artistic creativity, they're about personal expression. all the blues guitarists stole riffs from each other.
if there was absolute justice in the world, the boot of god would come down from the sky, kick jimmy in the ass and redistribute his sizable fortune across about 50 blues guitarists, many of colour, and most of whom are now dead. alas...
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
well, stairway isn't really a blues tune. and the rip is more in the arrangement.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
btw, this is my walkaway conclusion from researching my diet and trying to be a little bit more healthy...
"eat food. not too much. mostly plants."
this is more or less how i've lived my whole life. i'm more confirming my existing philosophy than deriving a new one...
...and i don't think that's an oversimplification. it's not that it doesn't matter what you eat, it's that it only matters in relation to how your body *stores* what you consume, which is what happens when you eat *too much*. so, processed carbs are worse for your heart than red meat, but it's not because of how your body metabolizes it but because of how your body stores the fat. there's a growing problem with people that replaced too much red meat with too much processed carbs. basically, they didn't grasp that the real problem is that their lifestyles have them eating far too much relative to the amount of exercise they get. in the end, your body stores processed carbs as badly as or worse than it stores red meat and the same problems end up happening; replacing too much of one thing with too much of another doesn't solve anything.
i don't think studies have been done on it, but i would suspect that you'd see the same problems amongst people that eat thousands of calories worth of fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. if you eat so much fruit that your body is forced to store it, stuff starts getting clogged....
so, if the problem is the way your body stores fuel (perhaps we're not really evolved to store fuel as fat as well as we could be), then the solution is to reduce the amount of fuel it's storing by reducing diet as much as possible, or burning it all off. it's less about *what goes in* and more about *how much gets stored*.
it follows that a bagel that contains 15% of your daily carb intake is absolutely fine if it's also 50% of the carbs you eat through the day. and etc.
this is not a problem for me to accomplish because i don't follow set eating times. i follow my stomach, and eat when i'm hungry. i really couldn't imagine eating thrice daily - that strikes me as pure insanity. twice, at most....
but, extrapolating what i've learned, that's maybe the best advice there is: don't eat unless you're hungry.
i do need to reiterate that life really is almost absolutely perfect for me right now. if i could define an existence for myself in a computer model, it would be almost exactly the life that i'm living right now. excluding border papers, there's nothing i want that i don't have. i have unrestricted free time. i'm getting some work done for the first time in many years. i legitimately couldn't be happier.
i continue to have these bizarrely vivid recurring dreams about lions and tigers. it's been going on for years - decades, maybe - but it comes and goes. recently, it's been really intense....
the plot is some variation on how i'm supposed to get used to them and stop being silly because the idea that they're going to eat me is just me being paranoid, but me knowing better, and escaping moments before they turn on me, which always "excites them" into eating some loved one, which i get the blame for. further, the dream is almost always set in the south gloucester ghetto/project/neighbourhood i grew up in.
i'm convinced i had some kind of traumatic childhood experience with some kind of large cat that lived around the corner on hunter's way, near the community pool. i don't know if it was ever confirmed that there was a large cat living there or not, but i know exactly what house it was. it's very vivid. i was going out to go swimming on my little bicycle (i couldn't have been more than ten years old), and i looked up and saw a bengal tiger walk by. i was absolutely nerd enough of a kid to know the precise difference between a bengal tiger, a snow leopard, an african lion, a puma, a serval, an oceolot, a black jaguar, a cheetah, etc. i had taken out a book from the library that categorically listed every known species of cat (including the smaller species of african and asian wild cats) and studied it pretty closely, so i would have been able to (and for the most part am still able to) identify just about any species of cat i could've seen with a high degree of accuracy.
it didn't seem to see me. but, i sure saw it, and i got on my bike and rode home and didn't go near the pool the rest of the summer due to a very intense and very real fear of the bengal tiger in the house on hunter's point. but every time i explained it, people thought i just had an overactive imagination and was seeing things.
the tiger is usually a lion nowadays, and the place in the neighbourhood shifts dramatically from dream to dream, but i just can't shake this one. and it's not fun to wake up knowing that you just escaped a hungry pack of lions or tigers that you know is about to consume your sister and/or your mom....
this is the crux of what this thing is going to sound like, i just need to improve the sound fonts and clean the mix up.
this is a temporary mix, built up in noteworthy, that suffers from a slightly blurry drum sound due to everything being run through channel 10 in the soundcard synthesizer. specifically, i'd like to turn the snare down (because it blurs the toms) but it doesn't seem to be possible to do this. obviously, i'll want to fix this as i build more sophisticated mixes of the track. however, this is what the track sounded like on playback as i was actually arranging it....
written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in mid june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 23, 2014.
