What changed the way you look at music?

Making my own music changed the way I listen to it.I found that with a little perseverance and imagination,almost anyone can come up with pleasing and interesting sounds,whether or not you play real instruments or just mess about with software.Granted,we can't all be successful musicians,but with the internet music is becoming one of the most democratic artforms,if your main ambition is to share and get heard.My own recording career has suffered many setbacks,partly due to illness and getting sidetracked by visual art.It can be difficult at times managing two talents.I've been in recording studios and rehearsal rooms,and have stuff of my own on tape and CD,but am still to get anything online.This is partly due to a lack of ambition and really just not being bothered.But I'm still hoping to make the great leap forward,by which I mean to be recording,exploring my visual art and combining the two in the form of video-making.

I've listened to a helll of a lot of music in my time,and must say it takes a great deal to impress me.Speaking as someone in my early 40's,I must say that I am not often interested in what some teen or someone in their early twenties has to say anymore.Also having explored the genre in so much depth,I often find myself disappointed with music in general.One hears the same chords,ideas and refrains time and time again.I am also tired of reading about rock stars etc,and often find the whole mythos to be juvenile.I think Kurt Cobain was the last real Rock Star,and maybe one or two others back in the 90s.

All this leaves me free to explore the sounds in my own head,free of any "scene" or preconceptions of success.Whatever happens to me and my musical journey,I will always keep an acoustic guitar beside me,as I love to play,and dare I say it,even sing.

 

I think you might be mixing up the counterculture movement and the rock culture (not that they weren't intertwined) :sunny:

You must not be aware of the psych and/or hard rock stuff that is often called stoner rock? It's pretty big too.

 

Blues had a baby and they called it rock 'n roll..
Then rock 'n roll had an illegitimate child, they just called it rock...
Rock had a crack-baby, they called themselves grunge.
Grunge had incestuously produced flipper children, the sub-genera...
What we have today is post-modern mutant polyglot..There are of course exceptions.

 

Nearly inseparable here, when I was growing up.

Frankenstein's monster.

 

What is ment exactly with polyglot in regards to todays rockscene?

Personally I think rock 'n roll simply got a whole bunch of kids if we use that analogy. Grunge is (imo) one of the smaller, less worth noticing grandkids. It just got more famous than bigger and longerlasting subgenres because of Nirvana.

 

funny that I went to see Kenny Rogers right before I seen the Grateful Dead. And I got to thinking. This is the same crowd that was in the Kenny Rogers show. And Jerry looked like Kenny Rogers when I was tripping my ass off.. Then somehow I dematerialized in one section and found myself in another section. Lost my shoes on a warm and summer's evening..

 

I agree. Many things changed as a result of rock music. I think what I was trying to get at about my own attitude relates more to my own personal association of rock music with a certain historical period, a time in which many attitudes shifted and society changed quite a lot.
Without the legacy of rock n roll, the rave scene would never have come about.

There's a difference though Karen. Beethoven wrote music which any top class orchestra can play, and although there are differences between different performances, it still sounds pretty much the same.
Music by the Beatles or the Grateful Dead could be covered by other bands, but it is never going to sound like the original. So you can listen to the originals, but I find only in small doses, or I just get bored.

Guitar based stuff was always my favorite.

A lot of electronic music now is produced entirely on computers.

Could you give examples of the kind of stuff you mean?

Thats probably true in some cases, but when I saw Neil Young just 4 years back, he had the most impressive PA I've ever seen.

Some stuff has to be compressed to a certain degree to avoid highs and lows in the volume that would be too extreme. Overdoing it though is a common thing.
Maybe advanced studio technology is one reason for the decline of rock music (as I see it). Back in the day it was all more rough and ready, and maybe the raw quality now just gets smoothed away.

 

Todays rockscene exists only as sub-genras, most of which are parodys of themselves.

Modern Country, the most popular music in America today, is the best example of polyglot. They have appropriated everything from high-flyin' 70s guitar rock to electronica and hip-hop, the latter of course being biggest piece of shit to hit the corporate fan, made even disco sound good.

Grunge had a powerfull effect on the perception of rock. It was anti-virtuoso, "kill the rockstar"

Despite decades of progressive rock guitar history, Kust Cobain played lead guitar like a retarded 5 year old and somehow people thought that was pretty cool, now anyone could be a rock dude (or dudette!) without all the boring practice. Enter Indie...

 

Those are not keyboards, they are synthesizers, most of which come with a keyboard controller because of convenience but this is not exclusively the case; the modular analog machines used to have different methods of routing signals, many used patch cables, some used resistive pins in a patch matrix. One thing is for certain though, I have yet to see a synthesizer, analog, virtual analog (physical modeling) or digital, which utilizes a keyboard controller, that lacks a pitch bend wheel, which means that note-bending is not only possible, it's actually taken to an extreme that a guitar cannot match even with serious skill (for the record, I am a lover and player of both). The problem with the popular electronic music, as with all styles, is that most people have no idea what they are doing in terms of sound synthesis, they use presets and simple software editing tools which almost make the music automatically.

 

Time.

 

2/4, 4/4, 3/4 or something more exotic like a 9/8 12/8?

 

I think more something linear.

 

That boring ole illusion again? Bah!

 

That's one way of looking at our OdonII edit: or his music taste

 

Id like to tell ya as a 14 yr old kid watching the Ed Sullivan show 50 yrs ago changed the way I looked at music. . .but the fact is I was taking lessons,,learning folk songs on a cheap guitar at that time. :guitarist:
I remembering listening to a lot of stuff by a guy calling himself Bob Dylan. I was still a little young to go to the old haunts in Greenwich Village at the time- -but Id have to say this type of music at that time influenced me more than any other . By the time I was older ,I think the Mo-Town sound had a big influence (especially in the service)

Thinking back I think what changed the way I looked at music from the ol Frankie Sinatra that was always playing in our Apartment was the changing times ,especially the whole civil rights mov,t
---------- but,then -------------------
By the time the 70,s rolled around "The bus stopped and I got on"- -and then Id say the Dead and thier style had more of a effect than any other music :drummer:ever did

 

9/11 everything changed!

Seriously, I just meant over time my relationdhip with music has changd.
To be specific, It was once my best friend, now It is a casual aquaintance.

 

As a young guitarist, Roy Buchanan and Jimi Hendrix showed me the power of the blues, the bent note and real time composition (improvised solos) .

Later studying violin and trumpet, I learned the the vast richness of musical history, the science that goes into building these instruments ( I have built several violins from billet), and the dedication it takes to make beautiful sounds on those instruments.

 

Another thing that changed the way I see music was getting my first guitar pedals - mainly distortion,delay and chorus - and of course,a wah wah pedal.It was like "So that's how they get those sounds..." I challenge anyone not to have fun with this kind of gear.

 

ABBA; Lady Gaga.

Of course there are differences! That's part of what makes every era unique and interesting.

What all great music has in common is that it ages well. Two hundred years from now, a young person will be able to listen to Beethoven's Fifth, Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and Louis Armstrong's Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, and be simultaneously impressed and entertained by all four of them. It won't matter much to them when it was written or recorded.

I hate it when people say classic rock, or classical, or jazz, or the blues is dead. They will be dead when (if ever) people don't care to hear them anymore, when they no longer have their own channels on satellite radio, and nobody performs it live for paying customers anywhere. Ragtime is dead. Gregorian chants are dead.

I'm with you. There is a local classic rock station that plays the same stuff all day and night every day, but I only allow myself to listen once every two weeks. I don't want to get too tired of it.

Isn't it great that we have so much variety available to us now? Nobody in history has been so privileged.

When your goal is the mathematical precision of Bach, you no longer need the ability to perform in real time. This is where the superior human qualities of the blues shine through.

Oh god, don't get me started...

I know what a fucking synthesizer is. Some of them are nothing more than software running on a laptop.

There are creative reasons why these haven't been frequently used in hits destined to become classics. As much as every keyboardist has wanted to bend a note now and then, most of us understand why we generally need to leave it alone. It's where the guitars excel. Not our specialty.

 

Software... which yield damn near the same results after countless hours of painstaking replication.. the point is not in the product but in how it is used, some of the best music I've ever heard has been created entirely on softsynths.

And as for your creative reasons, pfff, sounds like you are unfamiliar with a little genre called 'funk'. Pitch bending synthesizers is one of the best ways to get down!