Music in general.
Wox posted his last reply on I’m saddened as to new threads to see if the spam bots have been blocked.
So here goes.
After years and years of recorded music, countless ways to regurgitate 12 notes, where do we go with music? Not kicking anyone’s song writing or such, but to me every song I record (original) or other peoples songs, they (and myself) come off sounding like someone from the past. I know this opening a can of worms but, where do we go from here?
A recent song I wrote and recorded and played for a couple of people, they’re first words were, sounds like a Floyd tune. I had no intention of sounding like PF, and it actually gives me a bad attitude when I here this. To the point of saying screw it. My wife says pay them no mind. How can I not?
I don’t know, maybe I just woke up with a bug up me arse this morning.
Yaz, it’s a problem that I have been mulling - ok, obsessing - over for the last few months. It’s not just pop music, it’s “serious” music, it’s dance, it’s visual art, it’s the movies. I just read a great book (for those who care about the industrial history of classical music recording) called the Death of Classical Music, and the author in part argued that technology has a lot to do with the state of art at any given time - now there are 250 or whatever recordings of beethovan’s 9th - at some point it made sense to make another recording of it, but no more, there is no reason to do so. And the best selling modern composer of recent memory? Gorecki #3, which is nice but not anything groundbreaking. Nothing new there. Dance? Name anyone as great today as Barishnikov. Actors? Who compares to Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly. etc.? Only one I could think of was Jodie Foster. Movies? I haven’t seen a good film in 20 years - nothing that compares with, say, Fred Macmurray in Double Indemnity, or Singin in the rain, or…etc… Visual arts? When Andy Warhol is considered great, given that everything he did the Dada folks did already and better, I mean, Duchamp’s urinal vs. a soup can? - well, the 20th century saw lots of things that pushed art ahead, but it’s all been exploited. All that’s left are variations. Art today, music included, is a corpse feeding off its own flesh.
Someone will say that folks have always thought this sort of thing, the end of knowledge, etc., but there are reasons to think it is true in this case. take technology. The only technology that I can see changing things is some sort of direct brain experience, mediated by a computer, that would allow sensory experiences of a sort not yet expereinced by human being s- e.g., we might learn what it is really like to be a bat.
This is a synthesizing (or autonecrophillic) and not groundbreaking period, and I don’t see any groundbreaking period happening in my lifetime.
Hendrix was the apex, the high water mark. 
Very true Tom in all aspects! It has been almost ten years since I last penned a song. I have tried since, but it just comes out sounding like someone else to me. I have alot of un-finished starts that I have no gumption to finish.
Not sure if technology will take us anywhere, nothing has blew my socks off since the moon landing. Medicine is at an all time stand still. No cures in sight, not enough money in that. Most music today is how fast can you play those notes. That’s a bummer to me. Movies absolutely suck! Hitchcock movies still my fav.
So where do we go with music? Keep boring our wives? Making the neighbors listen whether they want to or not? Quit?
I have no clue today, just a rant. Musta woke up with someone else’s blues today.
Geez guys!!
Who woke up as Mr Grumpy and Mr Grumpier today?
I’m older than both of you but don’t tell me you don’t get a buzz out of a new piece of music you hear every now and then? I just received the latest CD by a band called Axxis there is a track on it called Lady Moon that I put on permanent repeat in my car for around 40 mins.
I still look for that something that I hear that will give me a buzz!
Tom…Cary Grant, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly?.. Denzil Washington, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey!!
Do you really think nothing has topped Hendrix? Apart from his unique style, his songs were not that great with a few notable exceptions. That should stir the pot 
Yaz… I know what you’re saying about individuality in music, but that’s a rare thing. There are worse things than being compared to Floyd!
Anyway, I’m off to be Mr Positive and break out the new Gotthard CD I just got and blow my ageing ears to Kingdom Come.
Bring on the spammers!!
Cheers,
Bruffie
I got no want to get busy and track an instrument or anything else, for that matter… Hense… my Tracker’s Block continues…
In the end and after it’s on the hard drive it’ll be the same track that I did when I first did a track on some computer I had … If I do a track it’s for the technical betterment of what I’ve already done…
I haven’t heard anything new sense 1996… Just after Christmas. I put the CD into the player and it didn’t come out of the player for more that a year… It was a 16-bit recorded-and-mastered project… from start-to-finish… And it wasn’t for it’s music… why I listened to it… It was for it’s technical capture-and-content…
I don’t think and for the stuff I listen to … there has been another project that has equaled it… in it’s technical presentation…
Bill…
(Bruffie @ Jul. 02 2007,11:42)
QUOTE
Do you really think nothing has topped Hendrix? Apart from his unique style, his songs were not that great with a few notable exceptions. That should stir the pot
Ok, outside, right now.... come-on! You looking at me? Eh? eh?
(Bruffie @ Jul. 02 2007,12:42)
QUOTE
Geez guys!!
Who woke up as Mr Grumpy and Mr Grumpier today?
I'm older than both of you but don't tell me you don't get a buzz out of a new piece of music you hear every now and then?
. . .
Tom...Cary Grant, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly?....... Denzil Washington, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey!!
Do you really think nothing has topped Hendrix? Apart from his unique style, his songs were not that great with a few notable exceptions. That should stir the pot
. . .
Who woke up as Mr Grumpy and Mr Grumpier today?
I'm older than both of you but don't tell me you don't get a buzz out of a new piece of music you hear every now and then?
. . .
Tom...Cary Grant, Dick Powell, Gene Kelly?....... Denzil Washington, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey!!
Do you really think nothing has topped Hendrix? Apart from his unique style, his songs were not that great with a few notable exceptions. That should stir the pot
. . .
"Curmudgeon and curmudgeoner," if you please!
Washington and Freeman are very, very good, but not quite in the same league as the eariler generation. I dunno if you are pulling my leg with that third one!
Nothing has topped Hendrix. There are 1000s of folks who can play Hendrix lick-for-lick, and there have been some very good guitarists, but no one with as original a voice, with as much lyricism, as much spirituality.
I knew I should have stood in bed this a.m.
Mr. Grumpy, that’s me today. MaybeI need to move to a remote desert ilse with no communication with the outside world.
Haven’t heard anything to stir my soul since Jeff Beck’s guitar shop.
Maybe I’ll just fade away 
ya buncha manic deprive’s! whats wrong with ya spirit men? eye" are ya ready to walk the plank @ such an early age?hell no,what ay gonna do then? i" ll tell ya what ,form a band,with all 23 yr old chicks thats what,and you be the conducter,dig? and all ya play is hendrix music,cause if ya listen to any given album of the same time period as jimi,there isnt any comparrison,hendrix was penthouse while most others were basement or first floor dwellers,ok so lets look at our equation for happiness,chicks +you+hendrix tunes=titsbellgrande!dig?
Eyup!
OK, I’m going to be fair and give you a warning before I issue an Old Fart alert!
Listen to wozz and take his advice, I certainly would if I could tell what he was on about
By 'eck nostalgia’s not what it used to be eh?
Anyway, Hendrix couldn’t even play in tune 
Right, I’m off to trim my nostril hair.
Steve
(YazMiester @ Jul. 02 2007,15:50)
QUOTE
Haven’t heard anything to stir my soul since Jeff Beck’s guitar shop.
yaz… that’s the way I was feeling about 6 years ago. Thats when I branched out, when a friend intoduced me to Billy Joe Shaver and all of his fellow Texas clan. We call it “roadhouse” or “alt. country” not the pop country s**t thats turned out just to sell a record and make a dime. The songs are truley written from the heart and they aren’t about the girl that left or the dog that died
Steve Earle did it best when he told nashville to blow it out of thier arse J
I don’t believe that it is possible to do music that isn’t derivative. If you did accomplish creating something that was totally new, I doubt that anyone could recognize it as music. Good new music just adds a minor permutation/mutation to the old. If music is embued with emotion what more is needed?
Human faces don’t have that much variety really. But most of us never get tired of seeing the billions of permutations. I think music is like that.
I think that music fails when it doesn’t have emotion. New without emotion is no better. So now that I have pretended to have actually produced a thought, time to shut up. Lets go permutate or factorialize, or mutate, or whatever, with emotion …
T
To me, music is emotion. If the message comes across, I really don’t care how it’s made, as long as the care and passion of the material is preserved. Then the music “works” for me. I don’t seem to “get” music that doesen’t “work”.
The thing that bother me now is the tendency to regurgitate existing recordings and, for instance, use Toto’s “Africa” as a backing track to some new text. Why don’t they challenge themselves and try to recreate the groove from scratch?! I know this is a commercial shortcut as well as an artistic shortcut, but then, why make art anyway?!
The things I am passionate about is the way a small ensemble can just pick a theme up and get something out of it right away, all the players immediately slipping into their right “pocket” in the music, and everything just flows - the music sort of “writes itself”.
When I play with my musical mates, I strive to leave as large a room for this to happen as possible. I don’t care if it sounds too much like something someone else has written - if I happen to strike the same emotion, chances are I come up with a similar sound, although some might call it a cliché.
To take another example, how come, given our advanced state of plastic surgery technology, that people tend to look the same way as people 15.000 years ago? How about introducing some original changes, like the hands on the legs instead of feet, earlobes on the elbows, eyes in the neck…?
My point is that there’s a reason for music sounding the way it does, even if the reason is commercial. Commercial music is only commercial because lots of people tend to buy it, and maybe because it was inexpensive to produce.
I think that we may be on the brink of some major change in the way we discover, listen to, consume, explore, and create, music. The days of the mass-market is over - long live the direct-to-customer model of the internet!
When was the last time you ordered a composer/musician to do a one-off piece of music as a special gift for your spouse’s anniversary? I mean, carmakers, house-builders and florists have been doing it for years…
regards, Nils
Well guys, it’s not emotion for me any more. Feel like a dead fish or something. Been in a funk for a couple monthes and can’t get out of it.
2 long time friends/musicians (30 yrs each one) have recently decided I needed a jump start or butt kicking to get motivated into playing and recording again.
1st friend has me jamming with his band, nothing serious just supposed to have fun. Started out like that but now we have set lists, cd’s of songs to learn, and a friggin gig coming up in Sept. THE FUN HAS LEFT THIS!
2nd friend has us recording original music together again. He plays bass and sings really great. He writes really good tunes that have the preverbial hooks in them. But it’s left up to me to arrange and complete instrumentation. THE FUN HAS LEFT THIS ALSO!
I’m just in a really bad funk at the moment, pay me no mind!
Sorry I started this thread!
Pardon me for being born!
Yaz, don’t, I repeat: DON’T take all this upon yourself. If your friends think you are good enough to learn complete albums during the course of a weekend, or competent enough to do the arranging and instrumentation of their songs, use that goodwill to do those things at your own leisure. You are valuable. Value yourself, and make your music friends value you, too.
Unless you are dead serious about making music for a living, don’t allow any scheduling or other stressful factors into your music life. If you feel like jamming, jam. If you feel like taking it easy, then take it easy. Do the arrangements at your own pace and tell them “it’ll be ready whenever it is ready”. The arrangements will inevitably be better when done this way.
Most importantly: Learn to say no. Or take your musical friendship up for serious consideration…
regards, Nils
(YazMiester @ Jul. 03 2007,06:22)
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Pardon me for being born!
Yaz,
When I get feeling like that, it is often the prelude for being able to spring forward into something new, because the emotion is building up, and that’s a trigger. Music is my release then - I write it or play it for myself and I pour my feelings into it and feel better. And I don’t care how it sounds to anybody else cause it speaks to me. I’ve taken the crap and put it in a box and there it is for me to put aside, or examine or whatever. I can’t really say why, but that is very therapeutic to me.
Nils is right, forget everybody’s expectations and do the music that obviously means so much to you.
T
Thanks Nils and T, you guys are right. I’m just blowing off steam. Shouldn’t have done it here.
I am going to get my head right and do what makes me the happiest playing music! Not for bucks, just for enjoyment.