psn
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Posts posted by psn
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Short answer: new gear opens up vast fields for exploration of the intuitive sort. This only happens ever so often though, and the possibilities are quickly explored/rinsed.
Good luck trying to do something "new" today with a quarter inch tape and no analytical perspective. Or an Akai S950/Atari ST setup.
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48 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:
Right, of course, but in my opinion theory follows practice.
You seem to be hung up in some dogmatic circular argument that theory is what follows practice and therefore theory follows practice. I gave a couple of famous examples of practice following theory.
Synthesis is a part of musical theory, isn't it? Timbre, etc. What about FM synthesis? It was formulated theoretically years before it could be implemented practically.
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*by formal I mean academic.
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I agree with him until he says "then the theorists come after".
Theory doesn't come exclusively from formal theorists.
Sometimes a musician or a composer is a formal theorist.
Sometimes a theory is formulated first, then decades of music follows - as with Schönberg's serialism/twelve tone technique.
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Theory and practice inform each other in a dialectic relationship all the time. An example --> modal jazz was born out of an intellectual/theoretical realisation that functional harmony had hit an end point with be bop. Some new rules/dogmas/conventions were formulated and a whole new field of improvisational jazz was opened up. Subsequently, new theory arose from this new music.
What was the main driver for musical innovation in the 20th century? Within popular music, new instruments and new technology were probably most important. The electric guitar, distortion, multi track recording, synthesizers, sequencing, samplers. Within the classical/academic fields, theory played a huge role with the formulation of serialism, twelve tone technique, aleatory, atonality, polytonality, etc. While musique concrete, sound collages, editing, etc, were partially founded on the invention of tape.
It's funny how "theory" is such as mystical word to a lot of people, often linked to its supposed ability to limit or corrupt your pure imagination or your romantic idea of "genius". This is ultimately a bit of a lazy cop-out - that it's better to just feel your way into creating music rather than working analytically. Both approaches are valid, but most people working intuitively will never transcend genre/tradition/convention. Which is completely fine.To me theory is simply an association between the musical ear and the conceptual and language parts of the brain. I am able to recognise, let's say, the lydian tonality and associate it with the word "lydian". I can then go over to the piano or the guitar and improvise/compose within that tonality. Just as I'm able to recognise and name polymeters, I-IV-V progressions, syncopations, a swung drum machine beat or parallel harmony (chord memory rave riffs!). None of which hampers my ability to make music freely or intuitively.
Theory doesn't have to come from an academic text book, either. Every band on earth has their own weird, internal names for beats, structures, cues, whatever. The point is to have a shared language and be able to talk verbally about the music.
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I'm waiting for the second pressing.
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Goodbye Russ
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Some of the freshest stuff around for the last few years. Awesome production on all of it, too.
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Lookin' for his daddy.
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Tussy vibes.
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Four to the floor vs backbeat. Loopy vs pop song structures.
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29 minutes ago, jules said:
I haven't properly checked out Pool yet – but damn, the Watching Airplanes album is really hitting the spot...
Only one copy left on Bandcamp...
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Even YouTube, because that’s not streaming for me. With YouTube, you can't hit play on your phone and leave it running in your pocket.
Isn't that the whole point with YouTube
PremiumMusic?-
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Bandcamp is streaming, though.
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Ray da man!
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The opener is some mad tight FM funk, though.
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52 minutes ago, dcom said:
Spotify streams at 128 kbit/s, and so does Bandcamp; Spotify is AAC, so in theory it's a smidgen better than Bandcamp, but if you're not using Spotify HiFi, the difference is negligible. Why not just listen from Bandcamp?
Spotify Premium = 320 kbps
Spotify Hifi = lossless
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Oooooooooooohhhh.
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1 hour ago, oscillik said:
WhatsApp is getting nuked before 15th May, due to the terms update.
Please elaborate.
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Was on FB from ~2007 and it was a bit of lulz for a while. Got sick of the whole thing and nuked the account about 8 years ago. Never looked back, it was simply a great relief.
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3 hours ago, Braintree said:
Makes me feel like getting one more instrument from them and call it a day.
I own a Digitone. If you could pair that with only one other piece of Elektron gear, what would it be?
For flexibility you'd need one of their drum boxes. I'd say the Rytm for analog sounds (does nice mono synth sounds too) or the Octatrack/Digitakt if you wanna sample.
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Getting my first jabadabadoo this week.
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Any methods on cleaning the subjectivity palette for your music?
in EKT General Discussion
Posted
Let's say the task of coming up with something new is a matter of combinatorics. Find untried combinations of all the possible musical parameters within the presented setup.
The tinkering/intuitive method can be represented by the "100 chimpanzees in a room with typewriters analogy". They will likely follow patterns that are inherent in the gear they are using. At the start of a new era this yields new results regularly. 20 years in, new stuff rarely surfaces, as there is no method to the exploration and repetition is not reflected upon.
Approaching the same challenge with an analytical mind will vastly reduce the scope of the problem. It helps to have a full grasp on what parameters are actually present. A view of the musical history - what has already been done before? What are the common tropes? Are there parameters that can be borrowed from other genres/setups?
I don't have a definitive answer. No matter what - every now and then someone smart and/or lucky comes along and revitalises a tried and tested genre. And when they do, all their peers think "That's so obvious, why didn't I think of that!"
New fields in general allow people to mess around without theory, since a bunch of possibilities suddenly present themselves to be explored. And my main argument in this discussion is that sometimes theory opens up a new field in the same way that new gear does.