101–110 of 152 posts
I'm absolutely terrible at anything music related and can't hold a beat to save my life but I love the world behind songwriting and how music gets made. Best podcast I've heard is Switched on Pop https://switchedonpop.com/
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There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand. He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to cr…
Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to…
Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages.
Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to…
> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some pe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to…
> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some pe…
And there are also has many cases of people who did not have any of that perfect-practice upbringing and and have aural awareness that is on a completely different plane from regular people. I know some of them (I'm doing a Master's in Music Tech right now). I know folks who, without the proper years of deliberate practice, are able to do things I and 99.99% of musicians will never be able to do. That does not mean they will necessarily become famous or have great careers, but they can do shit that is out of this world. One of Canada's best jazz musician's recounted to me chatting after a masterclass about music cognition how he had a college student who came to him for her lesson and could remember EVERY SINGLE NOTE of Keith Jarrett's concert the night before and play it for him. That shit is not normal, it's crazy savant stuff. From what I have read, Metheny was in that category.
Music is a funny thing, deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing, but there absolutely are geniuses who do not have the same brains as us, and the top 0.001% or whatever has a lot of them. Savantism occurs (relatively speaking) often in music. If you want a counter balance to Ericsson's "practice is everything" stance (and there is lots of excellent material to take from Ericsson's work), I suggest reading Oliver Sacks, "Musicophelia", about the music related clinical stories from his career as a neuroscientist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some pe…
Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand. He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to cr…
Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to…
For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.
All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.
All you need to make music is an iPhone and some ideas. I make music like this on my phone after the kids has gone to bed. I simply use Garageband and a couple of plugins. Sometimes I connect to a physical keyboard. https://youtu.be/iS-gRUzPrKI
Ableton seems to have the in-the-know buzz though. Just looked at the UI for Ableton for the first time today; know how it's preferred by some over Garage Band?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some pe…
Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to everyone interested in practice and improvement.
I always liked listening to edm and when I first got to know that you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks the idea of becoming an edm artist sounded exciting and glamorous to me. (like alan walker, martin grx) I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats ( https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos ). Before I spent too much time on it I released it's actually less about making…
That's a pretty common beginner's trap, to have your motivation be to release music rather than in creating music itself. For basically any beginner you need many years to get to the point where that should be a consideration. Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music. Ironically this is what actually differentiates the greats from those that struggle: the former make music primarily for th…
However, I often think it's intended to mean "producing X so that other people can consume X, regardless of what results."
And I have frequently heard that it means "producing X so that other people can critique your work and tell you how to improve."
These interpretations seem to be at odds. I've had instructors in creative bootcamps tell me that the difference between the strugglers and the greats was that the greats released their work to the public, got critique on what to improve, and integrated that advice into their next work. In their minds, remaining solitary means you won't get that critique and will always lag behind someone who communicates with others to find better ideas and improve on their own.
So it really isn't as cut-and-dry as "screaming into the void is better", in terms of how I personally frame the distinction.
At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.
Put another way, if I were to write a thousand pages worth of novels over the course of my life, never releasing any of it, and just before I was about to kick the bucket I were to pour a bucket of gasoline on the entire pile of paper and burn it to ashes, I would probably feel the worst I'd ever felt about myself up to that point. I would have destroyed a significant product of my existence, and in a sense, destroyed a part of myself.
So maybe this way of thinking is flawed, and this clearly indicates that I am overly attached to my work, and perhaps to the idea of social acceptance as well. But this is why I cannot force myself to create if I know nobody is ever going to share a space with my work. Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?
And this doesn't even have much to do with the solitude that creating something necessitates - I am capable of weathering the darkest, loneliest storms alone, but only if I believe that there is someone at the end of the tunnel who would be able to see what came out of it all. Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.
Whether you like Ableton Live or not relative to other options is a matter of preference, but regardless, the folks who run Ableton are pretty cool: - run by real musicians who play shows, it came out of a scratched personal itch - so far, good new owners of Cycling 74, the bug squash numbers in the last couple of releases were stellar - totally hacker friendly, they know people release disassembled Python code for c…
Much less impressive, but I spent a bit of time building a simple M4L device a while back using Typescript, and put some effort into figuring out how to make TS play nice(r) with the M4L API (the JS support in Max is pretty basic).
I never got around to splitting it out into its own reusable module but it might be of interest to anyone interested in playing with scripting Ableton from Max, but not interested in learning Max’s visual programming paradigm: https://github.com/tomduncalf/livefader
Would be interested to know how Ableton’s scriptability compares to some other DAWs… I know Tracktion and Bitwig have some degree of JS support, and Reaper has its own scripting language. Personally I’d love it Ableton made the Python API etc. a bit more official but I can of course understand why they don’t.