Post #405,627
10/25/15 7:05:03 PM
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Yes and no
The mechanical moving bits of a tuba are too big to move them like the valves on a trumpet.
And unamplified bass can't be heard distinctly enough to take a solo.
So yes, the hardware today allows for low-range performances that wouldn't be possible 100 years ago.
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Post #405,628
10/25/15 8:29:29 PM
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I was referring to guitar and bass
And mainly again to Ashton's distaste for things that aren't made of wood and horsetail. ;-)
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #405,630
10/25/15 9:02:55 PM
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He likes those metal thingies with valves.
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Post #405,634
10/26/15 2:07:20 AM
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I weep for the attenuated definitions of 'music' and artistry,
now seemingly near universal.. mass-produced-as-never-before: singers who cannot sing in {any} "key", the entire encyclopedia of musical instruments now reduced to some faux-guitar things (oft shaped like Star Trek ..to emphasize their origin in pure fantasy?) And Yes.. it takes mental and physical discipline ... even just to play chromatic scales on any actual "instrument"; it takes mere memory and button-pushing to execute a digital script which manufactures your "bass" [or treble or mid] for you.
(No need to review a revulsion felt at a "pianist' who could noodle for hours without ever expressing a musical thought, a melody of any attraction nor an overall theme) ... to the resultant 'concert'. I guess that, in the end, as perceived by moi: that deemed Kewl rarely expresses more than the above, results in hundreds of sound-alike 'tracks' indistinguishable (to mine own ears) from each other, nor is there any place for the word virtuoso to be earned and noted.
And to pretty much exhaust (for me) the Pop-genre/post-Beatles (who merited Virtuoso-appellation numerous times) I just Don't fucking-Like the faux-vibrato and fuzz-tone resultant squealing and other SOUNDS of bloody transistorized GUITARS.
Period. (Though I have tried to listen for something.. Something.. I had earlier missed.)
Now the Brits: still retain a place/time for the Colliery Band (whereas our own versions seem reduced merely to pyrotechnic march-dancing with swaying tubas and other gyrations, all placing music-making way behind artificial visual show-man-ship. (I once treated a bunch of friends to a visitation in Berkeley of the Jack Daniels Silver Cornet Band .. which had much in common with the Black Dykes (UK version Band) in competence, great sound along with the showmanship. Dunno if they even do that anymore, at Jack D's: prolly gots all-gee-tars all-the-time now [??]
'Course I've already mentioned that event, in a military-school marching maneuver when .. the Drill Honcho {reluctantly, to say the least} blurted out, Everyone's out of step! ... except Brown :-/ Maybe it's the inverse re the exceeding-Popular sound-alike Moar-Guitars, but s'OK just so long as: no law gets passed making it mandatory to suffer them in order to get an oxygen ration card. I wouldn't want to see them all burned/all those people disappointed and standing about flummoxed: surely there should be one specimen in every U.S. museum. I'm flexible.
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Post #405,637
10/26/15 7:44:42 AM
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I blame Sweden.
Drook pointed out a while ago that guitars are old hat these days - there's very little guitar sounds in pop music now. I hadn't noticed that until then, but I don't listen to pop music any more. There was a story on NPR last night or sometime over the weekend. I can't find it now, of course, but it was similar to this New Yorker piece (from 2014): The Sound of Sweden
Who rules the pop charts? Swedes.
BY SASHA FRERE-JONES 2014-12-01
Do you like Swedish pop music? The answer is probably yes, even if you can’t name a single artist born in Sweden. Do you like Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold”? Pink’s “Please Don’t Leave Me”? Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”? Many of the songs on the new Taylor Swift album, “1989,” half of which were co-written by Max Martin, a Swede? “1989” sold almost 1.3 million copies in its first week, the biggest week for an album since “The Eminem Show,” in 2002. Swift’s album is a big moment for the musical influence of Sweden, but new albums by the Stockholm residents Tove Lo and Mapei reinforce the fact that the Swedish sound may now be the reigning pop language everywhere.
The first Swedes to dominate the charts were the group ABBA, in the nineteen-seventies. They were followed by the brief but intense reign of Ace of Base, in the early nineties. Today, Martin, who started as the singer in a hair-metal band called It’s Alive before moving into songwriting, can be credited with either writing or influencing a large proportion of the Swedish pop produced in the past twenty years. He and his cohort of songwriters are backstage workers, who write mostly for, and with, others, a version of the classic assembly-line songwriting model that has served artists as disparate as Frank Sinatra, George Jones, and Whitney Houston. (This team process does not diminish Martin’s individual fame in Sweden, where he will soon appear on a postage stamp.) As Taylor Swift shows, Swedish pop doesn’t need actual Swedes singing it.
Martin had his first impact in the U.S. in 1997, with the Backstreet Boys’ hit “Quit Playing Games (with My Heart).” He also worked with a teen-ager from Sweden named Robyn, whose début album, “Robyn Is Here,” yielded two top-ten hits. He then turned his attention to another boy band of the nineties, ’N Sync, and to a former Mouseketeer named Britney Spears. Martin’s most enduring legacy, still, is his work on Spears’s biggest and best-known hits, such as “ . . . Baby One More Time” and “Oops! . . . I Did It Again.”
[...] [Googlie goo...] Ah, it was a show/interview about a new book by John Seabrook. A related blurb is here. Here it is - WNYC's On the Media. Interesting stuff, but not a way to make interesting and satisfying music. Cheers, Scott.
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Post #405,640
10/26/15 8:34:06 AM
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Okay, okay! I'm getting off your lawn, alright?
Look, there are still plenty of people writing and playing the ossified-in-amber music you like, using The Rules to make music that could have been written at any point in the past 500 years. Funnily enough, there are also plenty of people writing and playing the kinds of music that gives you conniptions. I just got done listening to Ufomammut's Ecate album, which is not only noisy as hell, but also has a healthy dollop of hell-spawned digital devil's audio synthesisation. It's not like anything I've heard before, existing as it does at the intersection of grinding industrial metal, stoner rock, dark ambient electronic music and psychedelia. I'm pretty sure you'll hate it - but then, I'm also pretty sure you'll never actually know, because I'm pretty sure you'll never ever listen to it. But by the same token, there are people in corduroy with bad hair writing symphonies and quartets and fugues and etudes and other things invented not in this century nor the last, for the enjoyment of people who apparently hate change and/or fear the new. I know I'm screaming into the void, here, but for goodness' sake, Ashton - stop hanging your ears on the musical pronunciations of long-dead composers. It's like reading Shakespeare and only Shakespeare (or things that are written exactly like Shakespeare) and not even making it as far as Sheridan.
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Post #405,655
10/27/15 2:34:24 AM
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"I have the simplest of tastes
I am always satisfied with the best." Oscar Wilde
(Had he not said it first I'd have done so, thus becoming immor(t)al-er, even.)
The New has to earn its chops before it has any significance. Will wander through the W/pedia links and aim for a sample of Uffomamut et al. Via Rand I encountered a small group/trio? På Svenska, quite simple counterpoint of piano and (string) bass. And Modrin/also with a sane dynamic range and no virtual-SHOUTING thankyouvery much.
(Simplest: electric guitars are, to my receptors: the anti-endorphin). If I can't trust my psyche, then whose? should prevail.
Pax vobiscum --Smokey Stover
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