I really thought it was just going to read "Dont Suck"
I really thought it was just going to read "Dont Suck"
Formerly Dj Swerv (DJF since 07) || Listening to anything that sounds like Boots and Cats
12) Purpose.
This one will crop up from different angles time and time again. I might even open a thread on some of the more profound angles, but let me cut to the chase.
Different styles of music serve different purposes, and the best music of its kind best serves its purpose. Music is something that takes incredible brainpower to comprehend. The proto-humans who didn't like music died out long ago. The pro-humans who didn't like to sing along to shared songs, who didn't like to dance, who didn't like to find new music, who didn't like to listen to music they already know, etc, they all died out.
We need music, and what music does for us. It's critical to our success as a species.
As music makers, we are tasked with the creation of new music. What is your piece trying to be? What should it be? What can it be?
Straight up rave music, like some house and techno, certain kinds of trance (like psytrance), etc, they are all devoid of instruction. They provide a mathematical framework through rhythm and timbre that allows us to grid and consciously or unconsciously/meditatively our interaction with that music. Dancing to that sort of music, where you are dancing solo but within a group, is about expressing incredibly abstract patterns and thought through mathematically embedded graphing.
Humans reason largely through abstraction and metaphor, completely unrelated to that we wish to solve. The side angle of understanding helps us survive and thrive as a species. It is why we can grow civilization and more. (There's a drug connection/mind expansion element as well I won't get into, but basically the proto humans who didn't have a collective desire to try drugs all died out, too).
Not all metaphor has to be through language. We can have spacial/feel/movement metaphors that can translate into anything both consciously and unconsciously. The amazing thing about dance to the more "true" rave genres is that it allows maximal creativity in problem solving while keeping it so organized mathematically that it can translate to language without toooooo much intermediation.
The other important thing about rave, abstract problem solving, and dancing is that its not a solo thing. We witness and vibe off the dancers around us. We trade abstraction around the dance floor. So a very good dancer could be doing nothing or everything with his life, but his dancing alone might help say a scientist next to him figure out the next step to take in her experiments, and then we get a medical boost from that that progresses humanity further, etc. It creates a positive feedback loop harnessing crowd wisdom.
Songs with lyrics are a bit different. Rather than giving you a structure to use as your own sandbox/lab/mind-dojo, it asks you to orient your thoughts to the lyrics. This is perhaps why the rave crowd likes more background vocals, especially those on ecstasy. The ecstasy folk already are driven to focus on interconnectivity of people. And ravers in general are seeking more mental freedom and don't need clearer vocals.
Still, vocals orient and group our thoughts. Listen to Bob Sinclar's What a Wonderful World. The lyrics are obvious: there is a better world to create, now let's dance our way to understanding that world. But the lyrics themselves distract us from doing so. Meanwhile, listen to the instrumental drop after the vocals: it almost sounds like a pattern of arranging a crowd of people in lanes with vacuum air shoots that lead to the different avenues of how to create that world. The instrumental part without the lyrics--the part that isn't telling you what to do--gives you enough room to figure out the next step. In doing so, it allows everyone to come to a diverse array of building blocks, harnessing crowd wisdom better.
That song fulfills its purpose amazingly.
Experimental music, pop music, dance music, live music, programmed music, every kind of music has a purpose. Many expressions of music fail to live up to their potential purposes. You can't truly know the full purpose and power of your work because our right brain has reasoned far beyond your left brain to articulate it.
However, to make truly great music that does serve its purpose well, you have to give yourself the freedom and passion needed to imbibe it with the very abstraction it needs to contribute.
We need music to solve new problems. We need old music to solve existing problems. When you think of it that way, and think of how dubstep came about, it makes you wonder--what kind of amazing music is around the corner that will help the world make a real breakthrough?
The above post is probably the most important post in this thread I could ever write.
To continue it, notice how raw ass rave music handles melodies and vocals. Vocals tend to be weird, unrelatable shit, straight out of Strongbad's "The System is Down". It adds a dimension of both mental-intuitive dance anchoring and enough mental distortion to energize the abstract reasoning. Works with complex melodies like symphony stuff give us tools for how to think with music, but tracks with just beats lets us use those tools ourselves. Classical music also rarely maintains a mood to allow you to work through something in a focused, solid trance-state. It does, however loop back on itself in awesome ways. But rave music keeps the focus so that that inspiration and the subtle changes in your dance to work through something.
Anyway, the incredible repititions of extremely abridged, unresolving or loop-resolving* melodic motifs tap us back into the intelligence of melodies and harmonies that can also lead us to solutions in a different route than dance provides. And in say psytrance or more tonal based rave, it draws from melodic traditions from around the world, sometimes layering them on top of each other. So you can have African and Indian based rhythms, drawing from the collected intelligence of those cultures, combined with timbres from every culture around the world, combined with Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern, etc melodic allusions. I say melodic allusions because even though psytrance tracks have melodies, the melodies are more like suggestions than requests. They are present but more like lego blocks than action figures, ready for you to create and arrange them.
And again, other less melodic rave music, by not tapping into melodic intelligence, leaves more room for rhythmic and timbral intelligence.
*by loop-resolving I'm making up a term. Basically the resolution can only come by re-looping the motif, which also creates the need for more resolution, which then can continue on forever.
We are solving the world's problems with raves and rave music.
Some real gems in here. Repped. That being said, I am gonna call BS on some stuff.
"Humans reason largely through abstraction and metaphor, completely unrelated to that we wish to solve. The side angle of understanding helps us survive and thrive as a species. It is why we can grow civilization and more. (There's a drug connection/mind expansion element as well I won't get into, but basically the proto humans who didn't have a collective desire to try drugs all died out, too)
The other important thing about rave, abstract problem solving, and dancing is that its not a solo thing. We witness and vibe off the dancers around us. We trade abstraction around the dance floor. So a very good dancer could be doing nothing or everything with his life, but his dancing alone might help say a scientist next to him figure out the next step to take in her experiments, and then we get a medical boost from that that progresses humanity further, etc. It creates a positive feedback loop harnessing crowd wisdom."
I agree that humans reason in and through metaphors, but I would argue only related to that which we wish to solve. This does not mean that people focus 100% on the problem at hand, it means that all reasoning is grounded in a historical context which always bears a definite relationship to what we are thinking at any given point in time. This historical context (acquired through the experience of the present and what is preserved of it in memory) provides an individual with a context of inquiry in which the individual is always already directed or oriented towards. This means that all reasoning results in creating a metaphor which compares some experience to some other experience in such a way that, despite the fact that no two experiences are ever exactly the same, there is still a conceptual unity that is able to supersede this difference and unify the two unlike experiences and at the same time makes the meaning of this unity explicitly available in that metaphor.
This means both that there is no metaphysics and that there is no possibility for anything other than metaphysics.
If we think this way about metaphysics it means that terms like music, tempo, scales, notes, ect. were all invented to unify a potentially infinite number of different experiences while still being defined by those same experiences without becoming those experiences (that is to say we understand the difference between a note and that note). These terms were created in a specific context with specific goals, ie, to describe certain features of music. Of course sometimes we don't experience music in these terms because sometimes we experience it as more "abstract" or feeling based. This means that, even when we look past the technical language of music required to understand and solve the problems we encounter while making music and look to the experience of music itself, what we find is not a free space where the individual is free from rational thinking directed towards solving problems, but rather, what we find is a space where the residue of meaning that becomes embedded in our daily experience is reflected back to us. This is why blues music sounds different when you have a shit day. It is also why the right dance music at the right time kicks so much ass and why that same music would piss you off under different circumstances. We don't escape the day-day life in music, we dig into it. This does not mean that it solves any other problem than the need to satisfy the irresistible urge to dance or to feel shitty about getting dumped. If music can't cure cancer or stop wars (like you seem to think so) it can at least give us something to dance to in the middle of it all.
For this reason I am also calling BS on the claim that "Not all metaphor has to be through language.". This is because while I will not deny that people can embody metaphors by dancing (i.e. dancing like the devil, getting your freak on, getting down, killing it, the robot, ect.) but rather, that they can only do so on the basis of a prior understanding of metaphors mediated through language. This does not mean someone has to think about robots while doing the robot but rather that doing the robot requires that one understands what a robot is and what a robot does. Its pretty hard to embody something if you are denied the possibility of understanding it through language.
Also, is it possible that the use of drugs is a byproduct (a badass one) of the intelligence required to beat out other proto humans? Could the same thing be said of music? If you kill shit for the winter you might have the time to find drugs and write some tunes. I would say that killing shit probably let us beat out proto humans, the intelligence required to kill shit and survive didn't stop giving after dinner because we still have drugs and music.
Soundcloud - http://soundcloud.com/jonistaken
I quite appreciate the thought you put into all of that. You're close a lot of things, but not quite there. The moment we bring metaphysics into the discussion we're already outside of reality, and I'm discussing reality, though using somewhat myth-based rhetoric.
Before I begin, an aside: If we want to game theory human evolution, if music and/or drugs weren't of a significant benefit, then WE were the proto humans who got beaten. In other words, if they were a recreational accident, we're wasting calories and time being in another headspace, and the other humans who didn't would have had superior resources to beat us. But that didn't happen, so it's more reasonable to surmise that things that alter consciousness and perception, at the expense of sobriety and performance, are directly beneficial to our survival.
It would be a mistake to think that music or dancing or whatever only served the problem solving abstractions I discussed above. Any effective species will use the same calorie expenditure to achieve many things at once. Dancing can build a community, dancing can show attractiveness to a mate, dancing can clear the body of prior fight-or-flight adrenaline and relax us, etc.
However we do as humans build a foundation of knowledge and experience and mental connections without intended purpose. We are a curious species, exploring things accidentally when we have no goal. We muse and connect ideas with no theory we are trying to prove. We are constantly at play. And academically we're finally starting to learn that the more play we engage in, the better we do in everything. Particularly in future problem solving that has nothing to do with any task on hand. When we play with others, we can communicate non-linguistically experience and emotion and reality and build more intelligence that way. It all contributes to
Dancing to repetitive strong rhythms is a particularly powerful avenue of playing, so to speak.
It's the same reason we have art. It's the same reason we come to epiphanies watching things that have seemingly nothing to do with the thoughts we are working through. Don't tell me a cactus can communicate language. But (and I just heard this example but forgive me for forgetting whom it was) there was the gentleman a century ago who traveled the world and stumbled across Death Valley, CA. Observing the cacti, he came to an epiphany about ballet, and untrained communication of precise emotions through body movements.
He didn't think "I'm gonna dance the cactus" although that in itself is pretty wild when you think about it. He just saw the cactus, saw the ballet, referenced the far-from-Europe origins of the style, and realized what the movements of ballet did, and what they communicate completely without language or even direct human interaction.
I was able to tie the music and dancing into what is already a growing and strong field of understanding when I had the distinct pleasure of raving out at 3:15 AM to a Chris Lawrence set in a fogged up, lasered through, airplane hanger burner rave. I was just doing my thing, dancing really hard, enjoying the people around me. I had been mulling over the concept of metaphor and abstract reasoning a lot in the weeks leading up (thanks to a music composition experience... I'll share it later, if I didn't already). Hours before, I had already been thinking about the nature of language and its relationship to... everything... I can't really remember what I was thinking then, I just remember the lasers. It was more of a stepping stone anyway.
A friend of mine came into view as the fog dissipated. He had a smile on his face like he knew. You know that smile you get when you are creating something and it's working? Where you're like, aww this is brilliant, in the zone, watch what I'm gonna do next kind of feeling. He had that face. This guy is the best dance music dancer I have ever known. His command of his body in relation to the music is masterful. It was like witnessing an Olympic athlete or master musician or artist express a perfection of a practice. But he was smiling like a composer, a crafter, an inventor. And everyone around him was dancing in his aura. I know I dance in his sync when he's around. My moves are satellites of his moves. And I'm not the only one, to varying degrees.
Then it hit me. There was no thought no language no train of sequencial logic. It just hit me stupid. "He's solving physics". I stopped. The whole environment, the whole experience merged from a warehouse filled with music and dancers to a composer of animation, using his own body to morph the music into something meaningful and with his gravity, put everything into his orbit for him to play with. It was almost as if he was no longer dancing to the music, but he was dancing with the music. In the music. Through the music.
But I stared, and looked around, and...
And that's when the entire understanding formed. And while I know I am leaving out a few steps as I am about to leave for school, the experience was actually quite tautological when you think about it.
"I quite appreciate the thought you put into all of that. You're close a lot of things, but not quite there. The moment we bring metaphysics into the discussion we're already outside of reality, and I'm discussing reality, though using somewhat myth-based rhetoric."
You are right and wrong in this description of metaphysics. It is true that metaphysics is not "real" in the sense that it is divorced from reality (because we can make a distinction between a note or thing in general and that particular note or thing) but you are wrong that metaphysics is not "real" to the extent that terms of metaphysics are intelligible only on the basis of particular experiences. Metaphysics is bound to the physical and it is also entirely constituted by the physical even though it is not the physical. I also think that any conversation about language and metaphor implies metaphysics. This is because we understand the content or meaning of the metaphor as different than the experiences that necessarily constitute the terms of the metaphor. Because we make a distinction between the terms of the metaphor and the meaning of the metaphor it is always implied that there is some metaphysical plane or sphere in which the metaphor exists such that it has meaning that is accessible to all who have the sufficient experience to put the metaphor together such that they can understand it. Because we reason/think entirely through metaphors by finding threads of continuity or unification in all of our distinct and different experiences, this means that metaphysics defines all thinking. Because we use thinking and rationality to make sense of and understand the world it can be said that metaphysics defines reality while also being defined by it. Thinking about metaphysics this way can explain how you came to your own understanding of language, music, creativity and metaphors. This is because I described metaphysics as a system that is always self referential. In order to understand something you already have to understand it. This is not a paradox, when a child points to a garbage truck and asks "what is that?" the child already has some understanding of what the truck is, they may understand it as a big strange truck with a bunch of strange equipment on it. When someone explains to the child that the giant prongs on the truck are for picking up dumpsters and collecting the trash in the compacter section of the truck the child then comes to a fuller understanding of what a garbage truck is. BUT, the child could only come to this understanding by already understanding what a dumpster is, what trash is, why it is important to get rid of it, ect. This means that we always already move in a sphere of metaphors that are determined by experience while also defining experience without becoming or subsuming experience. This is why you can say the child already understood what a garbage truck is before the child came to understand what a garbage truck is without resulting in a paradox or infinite logical regression. Understanding is always tautological. We come to understand something by rearranging shit we already understand through the use of metaphors. This is true for music too. This is why Bach's system of counterpoint allowed for baroque music to flourish while still outlining the point of departure for classical composers like Mozart. This is why Mozarts classics defined the point of departure for romantics like Wagner and Chopin. It is also why the romantics outlined the point of departure for Modern composers like phillip glass and John Cage. This is how ragtime became jazz, how blues became rock and roll, how rock and roll turned into metal, punk, indy ect. The important thing to realize is that creativity always functions in a system of understanding with definite limits established by a tradition. These limits defined by the tradition also provide centers of creative departure. You cannot escape the tradition you can only work within it. Even the Avante Guarde is defined by its relationship to the tradition even if that relationship is nothing but the utter rejection of tradition. You cannot break free of the tradition and trying to will only show you how completely dependent you are on it. This does not prevent us from thinking of creativity as the unique synthesis of divergent branches in the tradition but it does deny the possibility of being completely original.
You claimed that-
"Don't tell me a cactus can communicate language."
I would respond by noting that a cactus cannot read or write. This does not mean that it does not communicate language because it provides a phenomenal basis for reflection. When I see a cactus I might think "oh that is a cactus" and then I might think "it looks really graceful" then I might think "since I am a choreographer interested in grace this cactus may be useful in helping me achieve grace". It's not that the cactus communicates, it is that we are always in communication with whatever context we find ourselves in and this allows for us to catch insights from disparate unrelated things.
You also claimed that-
"However we do as humans build a foundation of knowledge and experience and mental connections without intended purpose. We are a curious species, exploring things accidentally when we have no goal."
I would respond by arguing that curiosity is its own goal. The goal is satisfying the curiosity. Curiosity always operates in a context and is also defined by that context. Seeing how one can dance or how one can might make music or what is on the other side of the fence, all provide a context of curiosity that define what is necessary to satisfy that curiosity. This does not mean that we always know what is required to satisfy our curiosity, in fact I would argue that what makes curiosity so valuable is just that. We can look at a fence and wonder whats on the other side. When we climb the fence we might see a river and wonder what is on the other side of that. This does not mean that curiosity is without goals, it means that curiosity provides its own goal of widening our horizon of awareness. I agree with your development of the term "play" but I think it is a mistake to claim that "play" is not its own end or goal.
You also argued that-
"If we want to game theory human evolution, if music and/or drugs weren't of a significant benefit, then WE were the proto humans who got beaten."
I would respond by noting that just because we were successful over proto humans does not mean that everything that is intrinsic to being a human is advantageous, it just means that we had enough advantageous attributes to beat out proto humans. We also have a sac of poison in our bodies that can rupture at any point and time and kill us (the appendix). By your logic that too would have to be an advantage because "if an appendix was not a significant benefit then we were the proto humans that got beaten". Evolution does not predict that an organism is constituted entirely by beneficial traits but rather that they are constituted with enough beneficial traits to survive. The fact that we use drugs and make music is no guarantee that it is crucial for our survival. I won't deny that the personal connections developed through rituals involving drugs and music don't have some potential advantages in unifying culture or cementing an interpersonal bond between those involved in the ritual and that this bond may have some advantage in survival of the species. My point is simply that a distinction needs to be made between possible benefits and necessary benefits. I am also not convinced that the possible advantages outweigh the damage caused by drug use (although this is more true with some drugs than others) when seen through the lens of game theory and human evolution.
It wasn't too much work to put this all together, I have a degree in philosophy and spent my time focusing on language. I pretty much stole a bunch of shit from Derrida, Gadamer, Heidegger and Nietzsche to make these arguments. Maybe took me fifteen minutes twenty minutes to put together. I always find these arguments really interesting.
Soundcloud - http://soundcloud.com/jonistaken
Tip # 13) Adding richness to a monophonic lead/bass
Here's a short one. Sometimes you want a fat awesome monophonic lead that is holding notes basically until the next note is played, or even blends into the next. Legato, slurring, whatever. Sometimes you want it thicker, stronger, etc so you've added some distortion and EQing and so forth, but it's not enough.
Try this: hold the root note an octave or three below the riff's octave. Play the riff as you would, while also holding that note. Make sure your glide isn't set to zero, but also ins't slow. Notice how in those brief moments the synth line will smack and bounce down before shooting up. It purely adds guts to the attack stage, but the attack stage is most of our perception anyway.
If you suck at the keyboard, just pencil it in
Tip # 14) More coloring your of sound
Buss out a new reverb channel. Assign a spring reverb. Turn up the predelay so that the attack of the note remains clear. Spring reverbs color the sound oldschool. Mono the track. We are going for timbre, purely. Add distortion. Reduce volume or pan accordingly.
The color provided can be awesome. It just adds this richness and meat without changing any of the important stuff. There's a million combos like this. Often I buss out a spread reverb that comes after any potential distortion, but this is a case in which I do the exact opposite. I've been having fun slapping it on synths.
Tip # 15) Bitcrush your kicks
I'm tempted to say bitcrush everything. Bitcrush your kicks, and if you get the parameters right, you will find little loss in fidelity but some magically how the parts that make it through the filter have LOUD bass but still all the high end slap and drill. Turn up the gain
Tip # 16) On spreading your center sound, Primary the spread, not the mono.
(Primary is not a technical term.) I've been bussing a lot on my lead synths. Similar to #14, I've found success in starting with a really spread out sound, bussing it into a power channel (whatever distortion/bitcrush/EQing I use to make things fat) and mono'ing that channel. Before I was taking a center track and bussing out a parallel to spread it. Do you want to make a tree, or do you want to make a lightning rod? They are both good.
Tip # 17) Get some hard panned crispy percussion, reverb it.
I've learned this listening to future beats style hip hop. That stuff is trippy and has MASSIVE depth to the sound. Check out my buddy http://soundcloud.com/rupert-1906 . I'm trying to see how to give my house that much space without slowing down the tempo too much and using samples. Rupert and I plan on getting some work done together because we both want to brach out into each others directions. Fingers crossed it goes somewhere
Last edited by Hygro; 09-11-2012 at 10:26 PM. Reason: clarification on 16
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks