Boy, classical sure is primitive compared to Rap, eh?

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#81
I am going to be circumspect, and not say anything more. I may be banned for being too forthright.
I'm here (@ DiyAudio overall) to learn a lot more about electronics, building a few items - too many actually - and enjoying listening to music. Now and then I will comment on an issue I feel strongly about, but I'm not going to.....

Kevin
 
#83
My teenage boys listen to mostly rap, some of it ain't too bad, I actually tell them to turn it up. I like Post Malone (more an alternative rap). The only music I HATE with a passion is contemporary country! That fake *** garbage that comes out of Nashville nowadays.... terrible!
 
#86
waxx said:
It's a different way of working wich most of you don't understand, but it's the way rap and most urban and electronic music started, and it comes from the Jamaican soundsystem culture where remixing and sampling is normal since the mid 60's (since they had multitracks).

But realise that your and mine and everybodies view on good music is subjective, and that rap is not somethnig new, it exists in it's most primitive form (the jamaican soundsystem mc's) since the late 40'sn and in it's classicl american form since the early 70's. It's not a hype, it's a decades old artform that inspire millions of people. Maybe not you, but many do rate it very high.
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I do understand quite well - having started DJing in the early 80’s. But what they are making now is a far cry from where it started - the goal was to make something “musical” that even white people would dance to. We would do our own “rap” and mix it right in with all those Tommy Boy 12’” - till the school administration stepped in and put the kabash on it. Somewhere between the 80’s and 90’s rap evolved into an art form that even the artists themselves describe as urban poetry, not “music”. Mostly just a computer or beat box, with a “bass line” that sounds like someone thumbing the end of the RCA cord, and someone with a mic shooting off his mouth. It in no way resembles “Planet Rock”. I loved that old ****.
 
#87
Pharos said:
Where on earth do you get the sense of rap as poetic? Just because a few liberal arts academics say so?
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Sorry but that question can apply to anything written in any form of verse. What makes you think Keats or Poe wrote poetry? Just because a few academics said so? ... See what I mean. I think it's a subjective thing.

Sorry about the embedding in the previous post, I though the software would separate my words form yours.
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I do it by manually typing in the [ /quote ] and [ quote ] tags as I go, but without the spaces.

What I hear is anger, the sort you might get in a street confrontation, not very articulate, but very forceful.
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Like I said ... Gronk chest pounding at the communal fire.
 
#88
waxx said:
If you don't like rap, that is ok, that is your right. I don't like progrock and find those bands that many of you mention here also crap. But realise that your and mine and everybodies view on good music is subjective, and that rap is not somethnig new, it exists in it's most primitive form (the jamaican soundsystem mc's) since the late 40'sn and in it's classicl american form since the early 70's. It's not a hype, it's a decades old artform that inspire millions of people. Maybe not you, but many do rate it very high.
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From the other side of that, I find modern Rap to be painfully vulgar and aggressive where my preferences lean more toward what some would call "Elevator Music". (Middle of the road Rock, light Jazz, etc.)

Of course it's all subjective... and nobody can fault you for your musical tastes... It's simply not a contest.
 
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#90
Drummer2005 said:
Douglas, this is poetry to my ears! Beautifully expressed! Glenn.
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Thank you Glenn. 🙂

I think we often forget that we are at the mercy of the mix when playing our music. It's pretty rare that we can turn up the rythm guitar or equalize the lead vocalist... what we get from our sources is what we get.

Another problem appears to be that many mixing and mastering engineers don't really understand how digital audio works. In the analog realm if you needed more voltage you just cranked it up until the board clipped then backed off a little. In digital audio 0 db is where clipping begins so if we want a 40db dynamic range we have to record at an average of -20db.

From what I've seen, they're just now starting to figure that out...
YouTube (It's a bit long, but very informative)
 
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#91
An afterthought... There is actually PC software available that will let you normalize audio just like the streaming services do.

Loudness normalizer for music files ... MP3 Gain

And a plug in for movies... AAC Gain

Follow the setup instructions and it works great ... but only does mp3, mp4 and AAC formats. FLAC and DSD use different methods.
 
#92
Douglas Blake said:
An interesting reversal came about with autotune, whether it's coincidence or causation I'm not sure. Where the goal was to catch a session or performance now most music is a singer, a sampler and a drum machine there really is no live performance to capture. So, now the stage performance tries to mimic the final mix, instead of the other way around.
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I recall this claim from the 1970s, I heard "With all these new special effects, we can't reproduce the studio recordings in live music anymore." I think it was referring to the Doobie Brothers "Listen To The Music" which had some heavy flanging during the bridge. But then somewhere during that decade BBD chips came out, and any guitarist who could afford a stomp box could do it.
How bad has it gotten? ... YouTube

Hard to believe they could fix that in real time!
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That's pretty bad but I can imagine how it could be done. The song is sequenced to the drummer (or machine or beat), and the melody is programmed into the autotune. It fixes the note to what's in the pre-programmed melody rather than the "nearest correct note" so she could sing anything and it would come out the correct notes. Then again, hearing that, her singing is also really inconsistent with volume, enough that I question whether a compressor could fix it and make it sound good. On the third hand, her fans likely don't much care and may not notice...

I've also heard of bands touring with a copy of the studio multitrack tape that they play live to, and when a band member, singer, guitarist or whatever, is having a bad night, the live channel is turned down and the recorded channel is turned up.
 
#93
Maybe I'm deluded, but last night I watched a prog on Cilla Black's sixties and 70s singing, and was really impressed with the way she held her notes, and exuded what seemed to me to be a conviction and sincerity of expression.

This to me is far removed form the 'painting by numbers' approach using samplers and dotting in the notes on a computer screen.

The latter can be used to tidy up errors, or to create P. Fl. type stuff with much less extreme measures, and seems a valid approach, but to use it as a substitute, to me displays a paucity of creativity.
 
#94
benb said:
I've also heard of bands touring with a copy of the studio multitrack tape that they play live to, and when a band member, singer, guitarist or whatever, is having a bad night, the live channel is turned down and the recorded channel is turned up.
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Mostly I figure they just play the CD over the PA and the "band" dances to the music. Milli Vanilli got nailed for this by their fans... now it's the norm and nobody seems to care. Sadly it seems that where concerts were once about live music, now they are about pomp and spectacle.

So much of everything, today, is about form over substance...
 
#96
I'd rather use the word style than form, form implies some sort of effort to comply with art forms conventions and norms.

I do not believe that artistic taste is entirely subjective; there are established criteria for measuring its quality.

A baby crying is expressing emotion, but it is not in an artistic form.
 
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#97
Douglas Blake said:
Mostly I figure they just play the CD over the PA and the "band" dances to the music. Milli Vanilli got nailed for this by their fans... now it's the norm and nobody seems to care.
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Wait, they got nailed for faking it IN THE STUDIO - they didn't even sing on the recording:
Unlike the international release of All or Nothing, the inserts for the American version of the album explicitly attributed the vocals to Morvan and Pilatus. This prompted singer Charles Shaw to reveal in December 1989 that he was one of the three actual vocalists on the album and that Pilatus and Morvan were impostors
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Milli Vanilli - Wikipedia
Sadly it seems that where concerts were once about live music, now they are about pomp and spectacle.

So much of everything, today, is about form over substance...
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It's often been that way. I read about the KISS lighted guitar in the book "Look Me In The Eye."
 
#98
benb said:
Wait, they got nailed for faking it IN THE STUDIO - they didn't even sing on the recording:
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It started when the record they were lip-syncing to skipped in a live performance. The news about them not singing in studio sessions came some time after that. (Check the link you provided)

It's often been that way. I read about the KISS lighted guitar in the book "Look Me In The Eye."
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There has always been an element of spectacle to live music... but not like today. So much of it is now synthesised on computer that the songs don't even play well without the effects. Take any one of the new "pop" artists and sit them down on a stool with an acoustic guitar for accompaniment and see what happens...
 
#99
There has always been an element of spectacle to live music... but not like today.
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I, like many kids had rock star dreams. In the 60's I played the popular surf music in a garage band with some friends from school. One of my band mates and his older brother who had a car talked me into going with them to see a Monkees concert, not to see the Monkees, but for the opening act, a new and upcoming guitar player.

It was 1967 or 1968. I saw the performer playing multiple loops on multiple Echoplexes, a primitive looping device that used analog tape loops and a moveable playback head. He performed many never before seen stage tricks, including setting the guitar on fire, and then playing it while it burned.

We looked at each other, and KNEW, that if this is what it took to be a star, we would never be stars. Coincidentally the audience of mostly young girls were not impressed, and some even boo'ed this act. The new guitar player was Jimi Hendrix.

When the Monkees hit the stage the screaming started and we left. The Monkees often used pre recorded music in their early live shows, since their musical chops were not exactly stellar.
 
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