complain about lack of balls here

ok you want to be musician you want to be a composer, quit your job, drop out of school, ditch your girlfriend, stop talking to friends.

 

inspiration will come.

 

 

its the only way, if you havent done it by now, you wont do it later if you keep on living the life of a proletarean pseudo-nihilistic slug. got me? if life circumpstances dont make you loose all your shit, you have to provoke that. also stop taking any drugs except weed, which you will smoke once every 3 days. no alcohol, no cigarettes.

 

your dreams will be full, you will live through rainbows of emotions every day, you will make music forever. if you cant program yourself to like working on music 8 or more hours a day, youre getting nowhere, trust in that, and if you dont, well try it. throw all your shit away man, just keep your instruments and enough money to live (get yo ass on welfare if needed).

 

when you will be able to relieve your pain with your music, you're getting good.

tell me how I can still live well and produce good music this way.

your life your problem, you will see.

 

just planting seeds folks :P

i allready dropped out of school and quit my job. no girl/ friends and no money for booze.

all i have left is this one spliff

when it's gone (approx 5 min) i will make groundbreaking experimental balls music!

Edited October 30, 2006 by u.p.

To be a good musician its also good to be a little lucky and semi-dependent. Like live in rich parents basement. So no work or school. But thats also somewhat not true, because ou need certain limitation.

good music comes from good musicians.

 

no amount of life-tweaking will change the fact.

ya you just need awesome ideas in your head, and also alot of skill in getting them recorded as similar to the ideas in your head as possible.

huh should we judge the quality of your method by the results inherent in your music?

no idea what you mean, im quite thick

  felch said:

no idea what you mean, im quite thick

 

Just pretend that youre ultra inteligent and you'll fit right in! :grin:

i am kinda into this thread.

 

like, i don't do this at all (i am definitely a doughy middle-class motherfucker), but i do agree with the philosophy. a bit.

 

that is, assuming you want to make steve-vai-with-a-laptop wild roger experimental balls music, which takes a LONG TIME. i've been trying to make really fast loose music like Madlib for a while, but that is hard for a bunch of different reasons.

  dR_PeNiSoN said:

ok you want to be musician you want to be a composer, quit your job, drop out of school, ditch your girlfriend, stop talking to friends.

 

inspiration will come.

 

Bullshit.

 

If you give up your life like that for the sake of your music, then nothing you have to say through your music interests me.

  Evil Sleep Ophelia said:

  dR_PeNiSoN said:

ok you want to be musician you want to be a composer, quit your job, drop out of school, ditch your girlfriend, stop talking to friends.

 

inspiration will come.

 

Bullshit.

 

If you give up your life like that for the sake of your music, then nothing you have to say through your music interests me.

 

For what its worth, I totally agree. I think that music is a reflection of you emotions and a reflection of your life. You cannot expect to write good music if you have nothing to write about. Thats why people who spend their lives locked up in their room practicing scales and sweep picking on their guitars can never get to the point of actually using their skills to write a good tune.

 

I find that the less free time I have to write music, the more inspired I get. Its like every possible moment I get to write something, I'll use it. If you quit everything and just expect the music to flow out of you, dont ever expect to write anything other than contrived BS. Feelingless bollocks.

 

Even just little things like a shit days at work can be motivation enough for me to want to channel that into some music.

 

Something my guitar teacher once told me, Music is about life, you need to have one to write music.

  Jubal said:

motivation doesn't depend on the amount of free time.

 

Yeah but if you are motivated and you have no free time it is easy to become frustrated by what little you achieved, even if it is a lot for the time.

while there may be some amount of base level talent/luck present in folk the more time you spend making music the better you get. if you spend all day everyday making tunes you will almost certainly get good. saying you have to have a life to make good music is total crap, no way. who the hell only makes music inspired by their life? (self obsessed whiny emo losers?) unless you test fly experimental aircraft or work as a forest ranger or clean sewers or something out there and exciting/weird/interesting then i probably don't want to hear music inspired by your boring everyday life.

its all about imagination. what you need is determination, time and lots of ideas. a sense of humour doesn't hurt either.

I wrote a experimental techno song called "I made 12 copies of the expense report today".

Edited October 31, 2006 by Invisible Sandwich

this thread is boss

  greenbank said:

while there may be some amount of base level talent/luck present in folk the more time you spend making music the better you get. if you spend all day everyday making tunes you will almost certainly get good. saying you have to have a life to make good music is total crap, no way. who the hell only makes music inspired by their life? (self obsessed whiny emo losers?) unless you test fly experimental aircraft or work as a forest ranger or clean sewers or something out there and exciting/weird/interesting then i probably don't want to hear music inspired by your boring everyday life.

its all about imagination. what you need is determination, time and lots of ideas. a sense of humour doesn't hurt either.

 

Dont agree. If it wasnt for such a thing as talent, then everyone who practiced something would be good. Definately not the case. You go into any guitar shop in the world and you're sure to find a middle aged guy who's been playing all his life and is no where near as good as the 15 kid shreading out next to him. That is the way it goes.

 

I think you take the idea of something being inspired by your life a little too literaly. I dont mean like writting a song about a shit you did in the morning. Its more like expressing your demenour and emotions at the time. Im sure everyone gets it where if your in a bad mood and make a tune, then that bad mood is represented in the tune you write. Same as if you feel tired or depressed you write something more chilled out.

 

I once had inspiration for a tune when walking home from work one day at about half midnight. It was pissing it down with rain and I was walking past my local park and I could smell all the rotting leaves and manure composting. Its was such a dank and horrid smell and I imagined that I was in some horror film. I started to create a story to go with the atmosphere and then began to think of how to score this story line.

 

Its not just limited to actual events either, you may have a really vivid dream or an intense acid trip which inspires you. If youre sat in your room all day, staring at a sequencer smoking joint after joint, then dont expect to have vivid dreams, and dont expect them to be vastly different from each other.

 

I do think that imagination plays a huge part in it, but at the same time the emotions you are trying to represent should be real. I can remember what its like to be sad or angry, but I dont get the tightened throat and rage unless I really am.

 

I think that its writting like this that gives tunes the emotion that the listener will pick up on. Im sure that there are tunes you enjoy listening too depending on the mood you are in. That is where the skill of the musician comes into it. Its the ability to not only express there ideas and emotions into their music, but for that emotion to be transfered to the listener.

 

I'd love to have more time to write music, but at the same time, because I am limited, I make use of what little time I do have. As soon as I finish work Im itching to get on my laptop and make some music. When I was un-employed this was not the case. I found myself just bumming around for no reason.

 

I guess with writing music there is no right or wrong, its using the method which works best for you. I guess this is the same as arguing over which sequencer is the best. I'm quite happy to work the way I do, and I'm happy with the reasults, so I'm not gonna change. Im sure the same goes for you. If you can just sit in a room and cunjour idea after idea from nowhere then fair play for you. I find it easier to get out, live my life, and take the inspiration when it comes to me.

 

I do think that living a full life and getting out anjd taking everything in opens you up to new ideas and inspiration. Something which might seem dull and mundane to a tired mind can be full of intrest to someone who excersizes their brain.

bogdan is the only musican I can thnk of that I like, that was a hobo.

universal beauty or whatever they call it....

nature/physics/the world is beautiful, we're part of the world, we experience beauty

there's something to write music about everywhere, just depends whether or not you see it (what you see is a personal thing so maybe for some people they don't see it when their life is in a certain state, but others see it everywhere or just feel it by existing).

i guess you can experience all that in different ways too, like being mathematical about it/really good technically and not giving a shit about all that stuff i just wrote, or being all emo about it.....

fuck it, i give up i'm fucking knackered.

  TechDiff said:

I'd love to have more time to write music, but at the same time, because I am limited, I make use of what little time I do have. As soon as I finish work Im itching to get on my laptop and make some music. When I was un-employed this was not the case. I found myself just bumming around for no reason.

i feel precisely the same way. this summer, i was unemployed for two months. i had very little to show for it, musically. if i did start a project, i would just become obessively tangled within it and therefore made some fairly shoddy tunes...there were no outside influences to occasionally distract my attention, which i need to stay mentally healthy. while i was unemployed, most of what i did consisted of making a pretty loop, and then just sitting there microtweeking it for hours, winding up with nothing better than i started with and feeling like shit afterwards. now that i'm working a full time job, the bulk of my afternoon sitting in an office is spent daydreaming about track ideas. when i get home, i'm so excited to give them a try, i'm far more productive...and i've been making some damn good tunes, one after the other.

  Quote

I once had inspiration for a tune when walking home from work one day at about half midnight. It was pissing it down with rain and I was walking past my local park and I could smell all the rotting leaves and manure composting. Its was such a dank and horrid smell and I imagined that I was in some horror film. I started to create a story to go with the atmosphere and then began to think of how to score this story line.

 

Wow. That's actually really fucking cool. I need to incorporate this into my life somehow...

i tend to write stuff thats fairly narrative or represents an abstract idea. emotion is all at the users end and i rarely write stuff that conveys my own at the time, more pieces that try to convey certain feelings to the listener. it takes a long time for me to write things and i'm not going to be in the same mood everytime, its fine if you bash them out but i take a while.

music doesn't have feelings, listeners do. if i'm crying when i write a sad song does that make it better than one that makes people cry? of course not. too many people buy into bullshit and think of music as being more 'genuine' when its written by someone they see as having the emotions that are conveyed by the music. it gets way more complicated than that anyway - there are things in music that almost universally generate certain feelings in a listener - certain instrumentation, use of some subsets of notes or particular chords are accepted by most as generating a particular mood. there are other things which people have little to reference against (especially in electronic music) and this makes things a little weirder - different listeners will perceive a tune in wildly different ways. anyway, i'm veering from the point:

 

to be good takes time because there are so so many 'objects' you have to learn the behaviour of and impact of and pieces of knowledge which must be acquired to write in a certain style - which notes go together? how do you stop clipping? how does a phaser affect the sound? what does a compressor do? how do different sorts of synthesis work? why does some music sound terrible with clicks in and some music is made from clicks? why do 2 chords sound great seperately and bad one after the other? whats EQ for? what does this one plugin out of thousands and thousands do to the sound? what does tape do to the sound? what drum machines are used for electro? there's a million of these and more and thinking about it all is totally intense - there are a ridiculous number of things to learn and no one person will ever know them all. this for me is why electronic music is so exciting - instead of control of mere notes, timing and instrumentation you can convey more information still with the use of effects, production and samples (not just other peoples records - you can use literal sampling to present images too - you could write a song about a car which tries to convey that idea through words, music, actual car noises and even possibly car sounding production of some sort!) that's without the fact that you can create noises you'd never hear in nature or be able to achieve through mechanical means and the limitless timbres available.

 

i'm mostly just throwing some ideas around and trying to work out to what extent 'time spent = talent' actually holds here, it's not exactly an easy question to answer since defining 'good music' (i'm taking 'talent = ability to make good music' as given here) is pretty damned tricky and everyone in the world has their own set of associations, experiences and genes that make every song have a hugely different impact on them compared to someone else. achh!! its an impossible question to answer! open to endless debate but hopefully some cool ideas!

 

ahhh! isn't music great?!

You're right. There is so much to be learned for people making electronic music. But at the same time I honestly think that a lot of the things mentioned are more to do with technique rather than musicianship. If someone is natural gifted at composition then they'll be able to write good music with ease, its would just be the "getting it to sound fat" bit which would have to be learned. Alternitively there could be someone who is naturally gifted at production. Someone who can EQ and mix a track in 10 minutes and design an entire soft studio in Reaktor. They may be able to make anything sound well produced but the quality of their ideas and actual musicanship would mean that the music was just crap to listen to.

 

Something like production skills and basic music theory can be learned to a good degree. But composition skills can be improved only to a point. My point is that I'd rather listen to music thats not amazingly well produced but was an amazing tune over a crap idea which sounded really phat.

Once in a while you get those bastards like RDJ who seem to be gifted at both production and composition. I doubt he's never been taught anything in his life and the skills he has are beyond something that could be learned. It a gift.

 

I appreciate the idea about writing a song in order to convey emotion to the listener, the listener having emotions not the song. I can see how thatb would work, its a different method to what I'm used to so its a little difficult to grasp.

 

Using particular compositional techniques to suggest emotion, like certain chord sequences, key changes, and good use of modal theory can definately add emotion to a track. But I stil think its a little contrived. A lot of the time I hear music which isnt bassed around particular scales of chord progressions. Chances are that its someone sat infront of their computer just using the notes that make sence to them, taking the tune where it needs to be taken. Its definately a more instinctive thing. Sure, you can sit there work out a chord sequence4rs and a scale chart for what patterns to use where and when, but I think this approach almost saps the energy and real feeling of the track.

 

I've got pretty good music theory but whenever I sat down and tried to write a track written around particualr scale shapes or chord progressions. The emotion I wanted is there, but it never sounds genuine to me. Where as whenever I've sat and just started playing the notes which feel right to me at the time, thats when I feel like Ive captured the emotion I feel at the time. (I dont mean like stabbing at a piano with a blindfold on) Maybe its just a personal thing. Being able to listen back to an old tune and remembering exactly why I wrote it and why it sounds the way it does.

 

Perhaps is more about using whatever methods you feel confident with. Confidence definately is transfered from the composer to the listener, especially if you're playing live. If you're playing a tune which you dont have a real belief in than you performance will definately be reflective of that. In the same way, if you absolutely love the tune you're playing, the crowd will pick up on that and feed of your energy. Cheesy as it sounds, its true. It depends on what makes you feel confident about a tune. Some people wont play a tune live if they dont feel that its conveying the emotion they want it to, others wont play a tune if its not gonna send people chest into their arses from the bass. I think I'm a bit of the 2 so it takes me ages to get a tune to the point where I'm gonna play it live.

 

 

Oh bollox..... Ive waffled again, soz!

 

Theres one thing we agree on regardless, music is great!

I didn't read most of this thread, but for what it's worth I really do think it's true that if you are REALLY serious about music, you do have to treat it like a job, and not just something you do in your spare time. It may be the best job in the world, but it's got to be your major life occupation if you're going to get somewhere with it. If you're working full time doing something else, your music won't reach half its potential. If you're still in your teens, this isn't a huge problem, but otherwise your time devoted to your music is crucial if you want to do it as a career.