TubularCorporation

Not "practice" like "practicing," in the idiom "theory follows practice," practice means application or execution. As I'm using it, it means that music theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's a tool for analyzing what people have already done and more easily applying aspects of it to what you do, rather than being a set of rules that you follow to make music that is "correct." Music is the horse, theory is the cart.

Alternatively, just smack the hell out of the keyboard rhytmically with your monitors completely off and record the MIDI. Quantize it to a scale. Cut a few clips out at random, with snap-to-grid turned on and the grid size set to one bar. Duplicate them all a few times, and arrange them on the timeline in some kind of common pattern, maybe AABA'CA or something. Turn your monitors on, chose a VSTi or hardware synth and find/program a sound you like. Play back the sequence you made and see how it sounds. Overdub on it and make an arrangement by ear, but try not to change the original track that much. OR Go down to the highway and record some traffic noises. Go home and run the recording through your DAW's pitch-to-MIDI converter. make an arrangement of the results. A bunch of geese can be substituted for traffic if you have goose access. EDIT: there was a third one but I got distracted by something and by the time I was done with that I'd forgotten what it was, but I remember now. Download an mp3 of some song, preferably in an unrelated genre you don't like. Overdub a bunch of stuff on it, then when you're maybe 5-10 overdubs in delete the original song and keep doing overdubs. 70s/80s trucker rock is good for this, especially the lightweight, corporate kind. Changing the speed and/or pitch aggressively before you start overdubbing is OK.

But they know their theory.

Shred guitar is boring.

Yes. Like I said before, theory follows practice.

It's apparently a rehoused Monologue plus a few Eurorack modules and pedals in a clever case.

Just don't forget that theory follows practice not vice versa, and it's a useful tool for looking at what has already been done and applying it to what you do but it's not a set of prescriptive rules.

This summer I'll probably pick up a pair of these to replace the 2.2gHz quad core Xeons I've got in there now: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-X5670-Processor-Socket-LGA1366/dp/B003EM2Y1O The way I work that should buy me another 5+ years on the current computer, it's already fine as-is for mixing but it would be nice to be able to drop the buffer size a bit more. On the other hand, for the same price I could buy an entire second r710 with 5670s and more RAM than mine has, move all of my hard drives and cards into it, an then set up the other one in some other part of the house (to keep fan noise down) and use it as a network VST host or something, or just keep it around as backup and really commit to using this specific model as long as I possibly can. The only reason I might not take that route is that it would be expensive to ship and it's a bulky, heavy computer. EDIT: or I could go used and get a pair of 5690s for about $150 easily, which is pretty tempting. 12 3.5gHz cores is more than enough for what I do.

The second half of my Mouser order for the Lyra 8 is now delayed until at least mid October for backordered parts, so I think I'm going to start hoarding stuff for a new spring/summer project: https://www.deadendfx.com/product/pompei EDIT: actually, looking at the build document I'd need to buy at least $100 worth of test equipment just to properly match the JFETs and transistors, so maybe not.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-mantras

The entire design and business model of Twitter is based around incentivizing the exact opposite, so they're a small miracle when they do show up. Yeah I don't disagree, I guess it's time to come clean that I didn't read most of the article and have been mostly willfully shitposting this whole time. Except for the the part about recommending The Sound Of Culture, that book is great if you're in to that kind of thing.

The last few posts are a good case study of why message boards are superior to Twitter.

As far as additive rhythms go I don't really have much vocabulary to talk about them in Western-theory terms because I learned most of what I know about them through playing (gamelan and tabla). The way it was explained tome for Indian music doesn't really line up that well with the stuff on Wikipedia etc, what I learned was that phrases were based on multiples of a single beat rather than divisions of a bar. And then Balinese Gamelan is different still because a rhythmic cycle is actually one beat longer than the number of beats you actually play in a rhythmic cycle, because the first and last beat of the cycle are the same beat. But that's more conceptual, in practicle terms it's pretty sequencer friendly in a lot of ways, at least in terms of how a cycle is divided up for a given instrument (across the entire Gamelan it's all kind of like bifurcations, though, where the main melodic part is relatively slow but the other instruments will be playing complex, interlocking subdivisions of that part if they're higher pitched, or only playing some of the notes if they're lower pitched... which is oversimplifying it a lot but it has been a while and again, it was all taught to us by playing rather than theory and notation)

I'm not annoyed with the thread, other than these discussions always being a little nervewracking because criticizing misappropriation of things like postcolonialism and intersectionality from the left without coming off like a class reductionist shitheel is kind of a minefield, even on here (not much on here). Especially when you're like me and just spray out some words and hope, rather than carefully formulating an argument or something. Yeah, that's not really my beef with the article, what I'm complaining about is that it frames it as if that would be some kind of big step instead of a bandaid on a comparatively minor symptom of a much bigger problem.

Honestly, a bigger complaint I have is that sequencers are all based around divisive rhytm, that's a WAY bigger limitation. Additive rhythm is a huge part of a lot of nonwestern music, is way more intuitive for me personally, and tends to produce a lot more variety but it's ridiculously cumbersome to sequence additive rhythms in more or less anything, hardware or software. Microtonal music in a DAW is really just a matter of turning of the piano display on the piano roll if it bugs you (which is one click in Reaper, can't speak for other DAWs), using instruments that can support different tuning systems (tons out there) and working from there. I guess it would be kind of nice if alternative mnemonic devices other than the piano keyboard were options in more DAWs but it's pretty easy to work around that. Sequencing in additive rhythm is universally a fucking mess, though.

Honestly I've used a piano roll for maybe 20 minutes total in the last decade, and never in Logic so I couldn't say. Piano roll isn't a very useful or inspiring tool for me.

Glad to see Delay 1968 on there. Best Can album.

I don't own any Mentors.

If we're going by sales and popularity, Indian film music has been globally dominant for DECADES, and unless something has changed drastically in the last decade or so it still is. The fact that people outside of the parts of the world that are majority Muslim or Hindu (which is where it's most popular) don't know this says more about neocolonialism than the piano roll in a DAW does. Anyhow, diatonic scales as we know them originated in India or China, but what we're really talking about when we talk about "Western music theory" is about 300 years old and was driven by technology. Advancements in metallurgy during the industrial revolution allowed the development and mass manufacture of the modern piano, the difficulty of retuning a piano to the key of every piece you played like you would have normally done with a harpsichord or clavichord led to the development of equal temperament, and equal temperament is what enabled diatonic harmony as we understand it to day to exist. I have to make breakfast, I'm not going to try to continue a half-assed, off-the-cuff summary of decades of interdisciplinary academic work that I've only read a tiny bit of myself, so I'm just going to end it by saying that the article in question reminds me of rhetoric I've heard from private consulting firms that help real estate investment companies "work with community leaders" in depressed neighborhoods to build gentrified versions of the local community spaces that had been destroyed by real estate investment companies. Like another version of the "using capitalism to solve the problems inherent to capitalism" routine. Oh, and it's only tangentially related to the conversation but since I imagine most of the people here who would like it are in this thread I just want to recommend this book again, because it's fucking GREAT: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Culture-Diaspora-Black-Technopoetics/dp/0819575771

Logic can literally load Scala files.

Also really pushing the definition of "cult" but this album is some top shelf early Jesus metal in the Motorhead/Girlschool vein. The singer went on to form some kind of far right pro-life activist organization a couple years later while continuing to use the band as a recruitment/PR tool, and that's worse than a lot of actual cults so I'm counting it: