A serious thread

  Dogboy73 said:

Yes! A serious response! A serious response on a board were the majority of members belong on the CBEEBIES forum!

I agree, although some of your posts on that Hooper Bay post were kinda 'conspiracy theory' irritations it doesn't really deserve the cunty 'oh so hilarious' responses on this topic. WATMM has largely descended into twats.

i never really stopped to think about it but assumed that BOC mainly wrote modal music, simply because i can usually just know the key if its standard major/minor and i cant with BOC. i dont know which modes they would favour, although im pretty sure ive heard melodic and harmonic progressions that are strictly dorian. they dont seem to use diminshed harmony very much, but then that would take away the smooth feeling that most of there music has, introduce sharp edges to the melody.

  felch said:

i never really stopped to think about it but assumed that BOC mainly wrote modal music, simply because i can usually just know the key if its standard major/minor and i cant with BOC. i dont know which modes they would favour, although im pretty sure ive heard melodic and harmonic progressions that are strictly dorian. they dont seem to use diminshed harmony very much, but then that would take away the smooth feeling that most of there music has, introduce sharp edges to the melody.

Excellent post, Felch. I'm familiar wirth the terminolgy your using having read up on a bit of theory stuff. Not a muso myself though so putting that into context is not so easy. BTW, how do you identify the key of a piece of music (I'm fascinated with all this stuff)? Does it just comes from lots of experience?

Cheers.

well the way i learnt it is that every time i sit before the piano, i visualise the note c in my head before i play anything. first three months, you get the note wrong, you will find yourself singing not even in the key of the piano whatever, but more and more, you get closer and closer to knowing the note of c without hearing anything atall.

after like 6 months when youve done that, move onto random notes, if you can crack C then the others will follow fairly simply.

listening to identify intervals and keys is easy peasy from there on, if you have just one note to base your hearing upon, then its simply a case of knowing what the intervals sound like and recognising them.

Cool. Cheers, Felch. Interesting technique but it makes sense. After all it's the intervals between notes that make music ........ music! Individual notes on their own don't really say much at all. What about identifying chords? That's got to be much harder hasn't it?

chords are just more than one interval. and when you learn music you learn the sound of most tonal chords anyway.

I've been interested in analyzing BOC's music for quite some time. Today I took notes while I listened to a stack of BOC CDs at work. One of many observations I made was about their melodies--or lack thereof.

BOC's music is often thought of as having "incredible melodies", but the majority of their music has little in the way of melody at all. Take MHTRTC. Sure, there's Olson, Roygbiv, Bocuma, etc., which have some great prominent and lengthy melodies. However, one of the most popular tracks on that CD, Aquarius, seems to consist of chords, a nice syncopated bassline, drum samples, sampled speaking voices...and no real melody (besides the highest note of the chords, and that seems too slow-moving and simple to be considered a melody). Sixtyten's "melody" is more like two notes flickering back and forth rhythmically. Rue The Whirl is a mass of blurry scales. And An Eagle In Your Mind and Smokes Quantity only seem to have an actual melody for a small part of the time (starting pretty far into the track)--just chords/bass/drums/effects the rest of the time. And to think that MHTRTC is waaay more melodic than Geogaddi...

(Would love to share more observations, but not all in one post.)

Wicked post, Feb. Very interesting observation. So from your analysis BoC's musical structure is often a lot more simple than the complexity of the sounds created lead us to believe ...... or from a musical point of view does it mostly sound very simple?

  "February31st" said:

(Would love to share more observations, but not all in one post.)

Take as many posts as you need This is all good stuff.

Ive wondered about this too, like felch I know it isn't standard major/minor scales, which means modes are probably closer to the scales boc use. If you look at whole tone scales, where every interval is a whole tone / 2 semitones, too they sounds quite boccy. I suspect that alot of it is played by ear though, I don't imagine for one minute they sit down and say, 'hmm, a dorian mode would sound fantastic on that!'

  westhead said:

Ive wondered about this too, like felch I know it isn't standard major/minor scales, which means modes are probably closer to the scales boc use. If you look at whole tone scales, where every interval is a whole tone / 2 semitones, too they sounds quite boccy. I suspect that alot of it is played by ear though, I don't imagine for one minute they sit down and say, 'hmm, a dorian mode would sound fantastic on that!'

I think a whole-tone scale is called a hexatonic scale too, cos its got 6 notes

the whole-note scale is hexatonic, but not all hexatonic scales are whole-note

I think their newer material in some cases is too 'clean' compared to the MHTRTC and before that days. Whether it's better studio techniques, or something else, some of the songs on TCH (the album) seem too clear and need to be muddied up a bit - still love them to death though, so I guess I'm being picky for pickiness' sake here!

  westhead said:

I suspect that alot of it is played by ear though, I don't imagine for one minute they sit down and say, 'hmm, a dorian mode would sound fantastic on that!'

I find this an interesting topic as well (it's part of the reason I started this thread). I've spoke to a lot of people that make some wonderfully melodic music. But when you ask them about musical background & training they tell you that they can't play a note! I'm always interested, in this instance, to find out how they go about getting their musical idea down. This is my problem as I get loads of ideas in my head for melodies, chord progressions etc. but getting them down always proofs difficult. I put this down to my lack of musical knowledge but it turns out there are a lot of people making really melodic music that are in the same boat! Are BoC in the same boat or do they have a stronger musical background & understanding?

they use the 'black keys' a lot and then re-scale by twisting the tune knobs on their synths.

i thought syntheme got banned

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonograph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goggles

Horseshit! And this thread was going so well.

one thing they do all the time is write melodies and chord progressions that are different than four bars long. i don't have their cds with me right now but you can listen to almost any song and hear it. the second track on geogaddi has a five-bar chord progression; that one track on MHTRTC with the stuttering/cut up guy talking goes in threes ... damn, i know there's lots of examples but i don't know any of the track titles! :-p

aphex does it all the time too; the second section in flim is five bars long, for instance.

i love that technique because i think we're so used to hearing cycles of four, when these weird patterns repeat at unusual times it gives the chord progressions a sense of rolling or cycling along.

encey

Nice post, Encey. Another good observaion. I've noticed this on some BoC tracks but I didn't realise it was as prominent as your saying on a lot of their work.

yeah i noticed that - the four bar melody repeatedly played over 5 bars of chords, it comes back on itself, a nice payoff

I'm sure they referenced that once in an interview, "the magic fifth chord" or something like that. I assumed they werent talking about intervals in the first place, and it does make sense seeing this.

suprisingly boc dont seem to use compund rythm that much, they could get some motherfuckin lush melodic sequences by writing the melody in a different time sig to the synth chords. also BOC to me reek of being naturally talented music creators and not trained, all the tunes have a feel of being great music, but i think if they had had 10 years of traingin in compositional theory it would sound incredibly different.

kinda like u-ziq. he tries his best, and he is quite good with the music, but you just get these chords in it that are just like 'wtf' and not in a wierd atonal purposeful wtf way, it just sounds like hes played the wrong chords on his pc by accident and not fixed it. the whole feel of uziqs actual melodic/harmonic content is so amatuer, but its amply repaired by his sick skills on the timbre of electronic.

  felch said:

i never really stopped to think about it but assumed that BOC mainly wrote modal music, simply because i can usually just know the key if its standard major/minor and i cant with BOC. i dont know which modes they would favour, although im pretty sure ive heard melodic and harmonic progressions that are strictly dorian. they dont seem to use diminshed harmony very much, but then that would take away the smooth feeling that most of there music has, introduce sharp edges to the melody.

BOC definitely does not write music in standard major/minor keys. I'm still trying to figure out to what extent they use modes (or whatever system that guides their choice of melodies and chords). I have noticed that their chord progressions use a lot of planing, where an interval or a chord will be moved around without any change to the relative position of the notes within the chord. (Debussy used this technique quite a bit back in the 19th century). Examples include Oirectine, Olson v.3, The Devil Is In The Details, and Heard Through Telegraph Wires.

arent modes exactly the same scales with focus on different notes?

they don't really use lot of notes anyway, so i'm going with standard pentatonic scale with synths detuned at unusual intervals.