How long have you been a MM?

  On 12/18/2009 at 1:20 AM, Berk said:

lots of people here with training, more than I expected

Thats what I was think too. Ive got up to Grade 6 in Clarinet. But to be honest, other than actually being able to read music it hasnt really been of much help while composing.

  On 12/17/2009 at 6:30 PM, Jonas said:

1993-1994, with 'jesus on e' demo ( http://www.videosift.com/video/Jesus-On-Es-Full-Video-1992-Amiga-Demo-Classic ) modrips for protracker.

 

So I've been tracking for around 15 years! Fuck I need to buy me some presents.

You made jesus on e? *facemelt*

Technically since the late 1990's, I remember playing around with copies of magix music maker and ejay.

But it really took off in mid 2005.. I'd been listening to alot of electronic music and wanted to try it out myself on this thing called Reason.

about 28 years.

wish i'd never started.

Since I was 15. I'm now 24.

Started in impulse tracker making funny songs like this:

PhoniX - Halflife.mp3Fetching info...

(you'll need the winamp .IT plugin)

  On 12/20/2009 at 7:11 PM, mosca said:

wish i'd never started.

If you dont mind me asking.... why?

  On 12/18/2009 at 3:58 PM, chassis said:

Thats what I was think too. Ive got up to Grade 6 in Clarinet. But to be honest, other than actually being able to read music it hasnt really been of much help while composing.

excuse my semi-drunken post from the Air NZ first-class lounge at auckland int'l airport (which i am in courtesy of my girlfriend)... but after much thought and consideration, i make the following statement:

"music theory is shite; an attempt to create a science from art. it is nothing more than the assignment of names to concepts that come to the most proficient of musicians quite naturally."

in saying that, i make no claims to being a more proficient musician than anyone else. i only make that statement after having worked as a professional musician with folks who seem to think that their understanding of complex theory somehow makes them better musicians - this is only true in the sense of being able to communicate musical ideas in a common language with performers. admittedly, that is a benefit to being fluent in theory and the language of music therein.

shit fuck man, i don't know if what i'm saying makes as much sense in text as it does in my head.

i may seem bitter, but i have reason to be.

okay i'm done. time to fly for 12 hours. i love everyone.

c

yeah that makes perfect sense to me, I agree to a large extent, im glad I learned how to makes da music mostly through trail and error. im not opposed to formal training but I personally think it can reduce ones inspiration the more you look at art as science.

I started playing guitar when I was eleven, so I been playing git fiddles for about 14 years, starting using computers for recording and composing when I was 17 recording my attempts in fruity loops to cassette and then started multitracking in pro tools free

anyway its taken me a looong fucking time to figure out mixing and to properly fabricate the sounds I want by keeping my head the dark for the most part and learning stuff song to song. I dont regret my lack of desire to learn music theory or take classes on it. Ive had a lot of fun with slowly making break throughs in my progression. musics is more fun than its ever been for me, right now.

The oldest tracks I have on my pc are from the spring of 2002, but long before, something like in 1994 or so I was making music on a tape recorder, copy+paste style..making various hip hop-electronica tunes from other peoples tracks I recorded from local radio stations. I should still have some two or three rap tracks I recorded with my friends somewhere. We did it in 1997 or so, to music from "In Sound From Way Out!" album by Beastie Boys.

  On 12/21/2009 at 10:45 AM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

im not opposed to formal training but I personally think it can reduce ones inspiration the more you look at art as science.

sorry Mr.Karlheinz Stockhausen I'm not saying you cant be an inspired musician if you are formally trained. Isn't one of the main things about IDM(the primary musical medium bringing this forum together) and other free thinking arts is to think outside the box and make stuff as weird you need to properly express yourself? seems like getting formal training would inhibit ones ability to break the "rules" so to speak.

i've released a couple albums and a handful of eps since, i dunno 7 years ago? i'm happy with a lot of my output. i am a creative person, but i get more instant gratification doing other types of art , like drawing and photography. right now i produce a track once in a blue moon.

  On 12/22/2009 at 12:58 AM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

sorry Mr.Karlheinz Stockhausen I'm not saying you cant be an inspired musician if you are formally trained. Isn't one of the main things about IDM(the primary musical medium bringing this forum together) and other free thinking arts is to think outside the box and make stuff as weird you need to properly express yourself? seems like getting formal training would inhibit ones ability to break the "rules" so to speak.

To be able to break the rules, you have to learn what they are first.

  On 12/22/2009 at 3:01 AM, Dan C said:

To be able to break the rules, you have to learn what they are first.

for christ's sake this is the most overused, bullshit, nonsense statement ever created.

you don't have to "know the rules" to "break them". the fucking "rules" are arbitrary nonsense put together by people trying to QUANTIFY and QUALIFY something entirely creative by nature.

think of the tritone... the fucking "devil's interval". it was essentially banned - unusable. there. a rule. now people use it whenever they want. rule broken. wow.

thank god for theory, right?

fuck that. art is art.

don't get me wrong... i say more power to those who want to try to dissect, analyse, break down, and study art. seriously - it's an academic pursuit like anything else.

but DO NOT try to tell me that the "rules" these people have come up with to attempt to do so in ANY WAY apply to the creation of art.

this swill is packaged and sold by educators and those who have been exposed to them in EVERY artistic realm - music, graphic design, film, painting.

for someone who has no natural inclinations toward a particular artistic outlet, education can be very useful i'm sure. and for those that feel that knowing these "theories" and "rules" may help them be better at their particular art, then great.

but that's all it is. for fuck's sake it's called music THEORY for a reason. if you love theory, great... but don't try to push it onto others as the "one true way"

/rant

c

I was unable to edit my previous post.... you WONT need the .IT plugin because I converted it to MP3. So its there for download

I started mixing CDs to tapes using an old karaoke box my mom had when I was in elementary school. Then during the end of highschool, about 5 years ago, I picked up my first drum machine, Korg ESX-1, and from then on I slowly taught myself keyboard and mixing/mastering first with Sony Acid then later going to Ableton when Ableton 4 came out. I really wish I learned an instrument when I was younger :(

  On 12/22/2009 at 4:21 AM, maus said:

  On 12/22/2009 at 3:01 AM, Dan C said:

To be able to break the rules, you have to learn what they are first.

 

for christ's sake this is the most overused, bullshit, nonsense statement ever created.

 

you don't have to "know the rules" to "break them". the fucking "rules" are arbitrary nonsense put together by people trying to QUANTIFY and QUALIFY something entirely creative by nature.

 

think of the tritone... the fucking "devil's interval". it was essentially banned - unusable. there. a rule. now people use it whenever they want. rule broken. wow.

 

thank god for theory, right?

 

fuck that. art is art.

 

don't get me wrong... i say more power to those who want to try to dissect, analyse, break down, and study art. seriously - it's an academic pursuit like anything else.

 

but DO NOT try to tell me that the "rules" these people have come up with to attempt to do so in ANY WAY apply to the creation of art.

 

this swill is packaged and sold by educators and those who have been exposed to them in EVERY artistic realm - music, graphic design, film, painting.

 

for someone who has no natural inclinations toward a particular artistic outlet, education can be very useful i'm sure. and for those that feel that knowing these "theories" and "rules" may help them be better at their particular art, then great.

 

but that's all it is. for fuck's sake it's called music THEORY for a reason. if you love theory, great... but don't try to push it onto others as the "one true way"

 

/rant

 

c

Just because I can, I'm going to quote Boulez at you... a lot

"Music is an art that has no 'meaning': hence the primary importance of structures that are properly speaking linguistic, given the impossibility of the musical vocabulary assuming a simply communicative function."

"What is music then? It is at the same time an art, a science and a craft. 'Art' is a convenient abbreviation for 'means of expression': this must be the only point on which everyone is agreed without primary discussion,. It is with the words science and craft that misunderstandings, and hostilities, being. There can, however, be no denying that a musician is both an intellectual and a crafstman. I have never really understood why it should be thought the first duty of a musician, and particularly a composer, to relegate his intelligence to a place among the dangerous, if not actually pernicious, accessories of his personality. He surely has the same right as his other 'colleagues in creation' to use his mind."

"Music is science as much as an art. How is it possible to study the history of music except, primarily and essentially, through the evolution of its forms, its morphology, and its synta? How can a musicologist determine the co-ordinates of a work without first studying its morphology?

"Only too often we hear or read that the quality of a work depends first and foremost on 'what the composer has to say', regardless of the means he may choose. What are we to understand by this phrase? And how in fact can a composer conceive his 'message' without a morphology - a formal scheme - capable of communicating to the listener? The whole concept of an abstract 'message' is in fact no more than a cheap sophistry, employed only to conceal a profound misunderstanding, or indeed complete ignorance, of the circumstances of a particular historical period and, more generally, of the means of expression at the composer's disposal. This sort of myopia is a relic of romanticism in its pathetic final stages, and it reveals an inability to understand the real relationship between vocabulary and expression. I must admit that any sensibility that catches cold at the slightest draught of intellectual air seems to be in a pretty poor way."

I have just always found it funny that people want to constantly break the 'rules', even if they don't know what they are. It's like setting out to make a movie that completely destroys all theories on film without any knowledge of what it is to be a filmmaker, to write a poem that creates a new literay viewpoint without knowing anything about poetry, or to paint a painting that destroys aesthetic culture without any previous knowledge of what a painting is.

Sure there are the odd occasions where people manage to create something really special without any formal training whatsoever, and completely avoid any previous thought on their particular branch of art, but I can't really think of any off the top of my head.

I never said you can't make music without learning theory, of course you can but this was about rule breaking, not about making things without musical training, I'm all for everyone making music and art. But I don't know how people expect to change a system without first knowing even the basics about it.

"but DO NOT try to tell me that the "rules" these people have come up with to attempt to do so in ANY WAY apply to the creation of art."

This bit is just silly, and you look like you don't know what you're talking about.

sorry Dan C but I absolutely agree with maus and utterly disagree with the opinion that learning music theory will make you a better musician. I've heard loads of stuff from so called "students" of music theory, and it is all, unequivocally, shit. all these music theory/audio technology courses etc may be useful for learning the technical side of things and then progressing to a job in a studio, but they ain't gonna help you make good music. music requires soul and passion, not rules and boundaries. you've either got it or you ain't mate. nothing annoys me more than some noob with no previous interest in music suddenly deciding to become a "producer" and going to do a course on it. fuck off mate, you don't want to be a producer at all....you just think all the flashy lights look cool.

My point was that music requires both to be really great, but I wasn't talking about that, this was about breaking rules, not to who is subjectively better or worse.

This had nothing to do with who is or isn't a better composer of music, it was more to do with my thinking that to really do something new and rule breaking in music, you have to at least know what the rules are. You can't simply just rebel against nothing, you have to know what it is you're going against.

Also, Wagner and Beethoven got my back.

  On 12/22/2009 at 3:56 PM, Dan C said:

to really do something new and rule breaking in music, you have to at least know what the rules are.

I could not disagree more.

the best music often comes from people who have no idea about (or desire to follow) any rules - aphex, sex pistols, NWA - there's loads of examples...

You honestly think those people know nothing about music? Not even time signatures, chord progressions, harmonies etc?

yeah I'm sure they know about the basic mechanics of music, but that's something that is part natural talent/desire/enthusiasm and part picked up on the job. you can't just teach someone all that, then expect them to be able to make music. that would be like giving someone the highway code to read then expecting them to be able to drive - ie the theory on it's own is pretty much useless. theory is not important inmy opinion, theory is just some words that someone wrote down about how someone else did something once...(obviously driving is not the best analogy as if you didn't follow certain rules you might kill someone, but with music, you're totally free - you don't need to know that there even are rules! you ain't gonna kill nobody....)

anyway, when I first started making tunes, I really didn't know anything about time signatures etc, but just went ahead and banged out some tracks anyway... I learned the theory part automatically from years of making music, but would certainly not describe myself as an expert in music theory. and I'm quite glad about that...

it's like when people come on here wanting to get into making tracks for a laugh and some idiot always says "I recommend you first read a book about music theory" - what the fuck? why? Jesus, way to put someone off... if it was me I'd recommend getting a tape recorder and recording themselves hitting things with other things.

Where did you get this idea that I demanded everyone be taught music theory, all I said was that to deviate from the rules of music, you have to at least know what they are. Even on a minor level of not following a chord progression in a traditional way. Not everyone is going to going to want to learn extensive music theory, and not everyone is going to write a timeless classic, I don't think that's mutually inclusive before you think I am saying it is.

It just seems to me that you dislike people who have been taught music, or who know a lot about music theory, which is an odd thing but whatever, if it makes you happy. This wasn't meant to be an argument about which way of approaching music is the best, it was just a simple point of saying that you sort of need to know what rules are to break them.

You don't ever have to know what the rules are if you're making music if you don't want to, there is no right or wrong way to make music, but you won't ever know if you're breaking rules, which I don't see why people think is so important anyway. That was my point really; how will you know you're breaking rules if you don't know what they are?

just to clarify, this was indeed about this whole "rules" thing... it's a completely arbitrary concept. "GREAT" music is only about "rules" and the breaking of those "rules" to those who care about "the rules".

people cite messaien and schoenberg as being groundbreaking in terms of "breaking the rules". well, to me, it's unlistenable shite. this is stuff that's CELEBRATED by music academics as being progressive and "outside the box". this only underscores my feelings that music academics and musicians are, generally speaking, very different things.

also... KNOWING about time signatures, chord changes, counterpoint, etc. is VERY different from STUDYING THE THEORY of those same concepts.

historically, i never cared for theory - i find it dry, without soul and uninspiring. however, in my work as a tv and film composer, i work with LOADS of "established" composers, most of whom went to Berklee or worse. these guys, more so the older ones, are theory nazis, and pride themselves on what they know. well, as i've "learned" theory throughout my musical career, i know all of this stuff. i've been working with counterpoint, chord leading, various rhythmic and harmonic concepts ever since i could hit "record". the only thing theory is teaching me is what these things are called.

"but DO NOT try to tell me that the "rules" these people have come up with to attempt to do so in ANY WAY apply to the creation of art."

picard me all you want on that one, but i COMPLETELY, 100% stand by that statement. i'll be creating things for the rest of my life. and be it music, photography, design, film, or any other creative outlet, there will ALWAYS be some academically-minded zealot pointing fingers at it and analysing it based on "rules" and how it does or does not follow the "rules". doubtless there will be those who laud it based on its 'technical' merit, and at the same time there will be those who deride it for its non-application to other technical standards.

as for the rest of us, we'll enjoy art of all kinds at face value, appreciating it on the basic, emotional level that it was likely created with.

theory and music academics will enjoy their dissection of aleatory, 12-tone, and other batshit insane musical concepts forever. and may they enjoy it. but keep your filthy hands off my desert.

c

you WRITE in the strangest WAY i have ever SEEN

  On 12/22/2009 at 8:18 PM, ieafs said:

but it's just ignorant if you think that knowledge can somehow ruin something.

just one last note on this thought.

i think it's MORE ignorant to assume that technical knowledge can do nothing but enhance creativity.

most of these Berklee / classically trained guys i work with will literally sit down to work on a cue for a film or TV show and say "okay... what mode do i need to be in to illustrate the emotion in this scene..."

that blows my mind, quite honestly. i understand it as a method, but i could never work that way. to be fair, many of them may not have an innate sense of musicality that allows them to bypass that step. the point being that it DOES constrain them to classical methods. when you have that safe framework to fall back on, it's much easier to be lazy and just think to yourself "well, this will work..."

as vehement as i may sound about this stuff, what it comes down to is horses for courses. the reason i'm so up in arms about it is because SO MANY of these guys i work with sell this "you have to know the rules..." bullshit, and THEY are the ones who churn out the most cookie-cutter, boilerplate compositions.

if you teach a guy to build a car using a manual and the same parts, he'll build the same car.

if you tell a guy to build a car and figure it out, sure he'll make some mistakes. but chances are that guy's car is going to be far more original, personal, and innovative.

just my opinion, after all.

c

  On 12/22/2009 at 9:41 PM, maus said:

i think it's MORE ignorant to assume that technical knowledge can do nothing but enhance creativity.

i don't think you're getting it. theory isn't something you learn in order to become creative. you can't learn how to be creative, but you can learn how to use your creativity in a quicker, more efficient way. it's like what someone said earlier about synthesis. for example, if you sat down at a piano/guitar/laptop/whatever and said "ok i've got this song in my head and i want to record it", isn't that where music theory comes into play? and why is it any different if anyone learns it as opposed to spending years trying to figure it out themselves?

  On 12/22/2009 at 9:41 PM, maus said:

if you tell a guy to build a car and figure it out, sure he'll make some mistakes. but chances are that guy's car is going to be far more original, personal, and innovative.

this is ridiculous. that's like saying all education is rubbish and we should all just learn everything by ourselves. i think you'll find about 75% of people (or more) are incapable of that.