What makes a plaid melody sound plaid?

their music is like getting in contact with some elusive alien child mind transmitting unique music flavours of  playfulness, fantasy, beauty, genius build ups and at the same time some special sense of thrillness, sad introspection ecstasies and all of that mixed with pearly synths, cool basslines, tender playfull pianos, plus tricky syncopated and off-beat drums and stuff.... to say the least

  On 2/19/2023 at 4:01 AM, Walter Ostanek said:

Don't they have an omnichord? To me it always sounded like they were button-bashing chord progressions without really knowing what they were doing. You'd get the same effect from letting a five year old poke at the bass side of an accordion

Reminds me of this bit from this floating points interview (https://ra.co/features/3548)

  Quote

Even though I do have that technical grounding, there's a process I use that'd perhaps be useful for people who think they struggle with chords but still want to come up with something that interests them. Basically I record lots and lots of chords completely independently of each other. The overall key doesn't matter, they can have no relation to each other whatsoever. Then you sample these chords, lay each one out on a key of a keyboard and experiment with playing them back in a different order to see if a certain combination sounds nice to you.

That's just one way of exploring new progressions that you otherwise might not have come across. For me, as someone who can get around a keyboard, I still might not come up with any of those combinations naturally. I've got those go-to voicings as you say. I end up slipping into certain progressions. But this technique can get you exploring harmonic progressions that you wouldn't have thought up, whether you know about the theory behind harmony or not.

I've done it on the new record actually. At the end of one of the recording sessions with the winds and strings I had them play loads and loads of chords. It was punishing. They were in the studio laying down hundreds of random chords. Different keys, all sorts of stuff. Then I lay them out as samples on the keyboard and hit them in a random order and end up with something pretty cool. For me personally, sometimes I reverse engineer it and rewrite it as a score and maybe use it for something else. Of course you can also use this technique and keep things really simple. Just choose two of the chords and stick a beat under it.

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i'm reading alco's post while high and i can't even tell whether i'm reading shitpost alco or professor alco. nice work either way, keep it up champ

  On 11/28/2024 at 10:49 PM, Dragon said:

i'm reading alco's post while high and i can't even tell whether i'm reading shitpost alco or professor alco. nice work either way, keep it up champ

 

there is no difference brother. that's the alco promise

Post-black-dog plaid have never really floated my boat. I think it's their melodic element that may be the issue for me.

What should I listen to that's closest in sound to spanners? If anything? 

Good grief, Plaid are so woefully underrated.

  On 11/28/2024 at 11:43 PM, perunamuusi said:

Post-black-dog plaid have never really floated my boat. I think it's their melodic element that may be the issue for me.

What should I listen to that's closest in sound to spanners? If anything? 

Maybe this... https://www.discogs.com/release/7321465-Plaid-EGR45-00001