Electronic Cliches That Are Bad

  On 3/17/2012 at 5:41 PM, AAAAh said:

I dont agree with most oof this thred because we like what we know, noone has eva made a music that is 100% origianal and if they have it was probably shit.

 

yeah why does everybody trying to make something completely new. everything has been there. boc rips off old tv show stuff. aphex rips off cage, krautrock and 80s. Autechre have their hiphop influences matched with contemporary music. I could go on and on. As a beginner you have to lern the basics by remixing great art.

The fucking minute long "wave your hands in the air" breaks in trance. If that happens when I'm on the dance floor I just go get a beer or take a leak.

There's a colossal difference between having influences and repeating bad cliches, and if you can't tell the two apart, well....

You guys should illustrate your arguments with examples. I'll start:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Zv_biQ_as

Read this thread while listening to this and count how many cliches apply

  On 3/17/2012 at 4:50 PM, Alcofribas said:

lol, i love this thread already. here are some more/me expanding on ones already mentioned:

 

ambient with piano. totally. and the piano always has to be this meandering chord clusters with a bit of watered-down terry riley-esque "spiritual" modes and maybe a quasi "solo piano" kinda rhythmic thing going on. basically, you sound like a looser who thinks if you just noodle around over field recordings and big reverbs you're ryuichi budd. but you're not.

 

house with piano: this always sounds like a cheesy digital workstation midi piano from the 90s.

 

idm with piano: oh cool, atonal classical music. with beatZ.

 

ambient with guitar: oh cool, you've got some delays and reverbs? that's cool man. oh, and you started playing guitar when you were 13? sick. and you first learned stuff like that rhcp "under the bridge" song and "stairway to heaven?" yeah. but now you're experimental. sometimes you use a volume pedal to create a nice pad-like attack on your chords, that's very ethereal. other times you might throw in some acoustic for a more organic feel. really nice. oh wait, this is just a bunch of boring pap and i'm sick of everyone playing ambient guitar music. did you just use a bow? wtf? you're not svarte greiner.

 

field recordings: these are not cool. i realize how unique it is to go into an old abandoned factory and clank on some old metal stuff. i mean, listen to that natural room reverb, and this was some sort of beautiful singular moment in time that can never be replicated by studio processes and can be used as a springboard for mystifying philosophical banter about the moment and the converting the non-musical sounds of our environments into musical language and fuck man a cricket chirping in an old can out in the country a two mile hike away from the rushing hum of the highway is just so meaningful. but let's face it, you don't have any ideas so you just recorded some random shit. it's stupid.

 

live drums: fucking lol, just learn how to program dude.

 

using samples that are sexy women voices or robotic male voices saying something. oh lush, the track broke down and this cool down-pitched dude said "BASS" or something. dude, did you just hear that hot chic say "deeper????" stop it.

 

using "homemade" instruments. wow, this sounds less cool than a real synth. oh, your handcrafted flute doesn't really play a chromatic scale so you just have to use it to make these creepy little sounds? yeah, just buy a flute.

 

making music with "processes."

 

using 80s themes. this is really annoying. now we can be musicians if we just use the most god awful kitsch melodies we heard in commercials as kids? and all i have to do is use the arpeggiator on a juno 60? and we can make whole tracks that just sound like a honey combs commercial played by edgar froese? NOOOO WAAAY!!! (p.s. also cool to wear some cool funny olsen twins tshirt and funny 80s sunglasses when performing this music live with a fischer price turntable and a wacky looking boombox).

 

scoring an independent film.

 

making a compilation of all your old tracks. they sucked then, they suck now. just make an album.

 

working with a vocalist.

Cannot tell if sarcasm or deep woods retardation...

trying to be aphex twin

Truth bullets fired; WATMMers duck

- Snare rush

- ambient tracks longer than 5 mn with women vocals saying undecifrable things

- Slow tracks with kids shouting random fruit names

- tracks sounding like they were recorded on old tapes

- acid (so last century)

- Amen Break

- claps

- snares

- hi hats

- wobling synthlines

  On 3/17/2012 at 9:33 PM, Kanakori said:

- claps

- snares

- hi hats

......

I'mma be honest & say claps don't do much at all for me 90% of the time in music. I find they only work consistently in, like, old 1940s Gospel recordings or that one track by Steve Reich

songs that go

tururururu tu tu *clap clap* tururururu tu tu

at some point

  On 3/17/2012 at 10:04 PM, Kanakori said:

songs that go

 

tururururu tu tu *clap clap* tururururu tu tu

 

at some point

lol

  On 3/17/2012 at 10:04 PM, Kanakori said:

songs that go

 

tururururu tu tu *clap clap* tururururu tu tu

 

at some point

You mean like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bAN7Ts0xBo

lol

loose "off the grid" programming that has gone beyond a nice limp and into messy cluttered crap.

NI massive bass patches, the assumption that a huge bass sound must've been made with massive, and the apparent obliviousness (probably not a real word) that massive is actually a very capable all round synth, makes great pads for a start.

Music that misses the point, expresses nothing, made only to fill 4 minutes of a DJ set.

Experimental noise performances that consist entirely of feedback and/or modular synth noodling. Both things have been around for decades, it's hardly experimental.

Rising or "evocative" orchestral music, more common in film than strictly music releases. Does my fkn head in, there is such a thing as subtlety you know. I don't need constant crescendo string parts to know that something climactic is happening. Such things completely ruined the last couple series of Dr who btw..

Similarly, deprived "epic" string sections or excessive synth pad drop out sections, not always terrible, but so often it sounds like someone with a very basic understanding of music theory mistaking themselves for Elgar.

when the process of making something becomes more important than the thing you have made. Super in depth and "oh my god how fkn awesome smart am I?!" type tech demos which result in dull, bland, unlistenable crap. Don't get me wrong, I fkn love geeking out over stuff, and experimenting is surely one of the most important parts of the creative process, but you can't base something's worth on how geeky it is alone.. in fact I sometimes wonder if there is a direct correlation between the amount of fuss made over the process behind something, and the shittyness of the resulting music.

also, not strictly related to music, but my bile duct is up and running so,

stupid fuck off pretentious hipster fueled pointless "behind the scenes" or "making of" videos, some product demos fall tragically into this category too. You know the ones I mean; soft focus HD macro shots, jaunty camera angles, agonisingly slow motion filler, freshly cast proto hipster adding a gear grinding talking head moment, lilting nondescript piano music, or possibly music box soundtrack. Nearly always has a mention of what fkn camera was used to film the damn thing in the credits, invariably it's a Canon...

and it's always to show how they managed to make something stupid like a hat, or a chair, or some other buttfuckingly dull piece of shit.

anyway, like I said, not music related but a massive cliche never the less.

oh, and people who condem the use of an Amen break whilst simultaniosly using a different sampled breakbeat from 40 odd years ago.

how to feel after downloading books like http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/techniques/latest/book.pdf ?

While I like it sometimes, rave music might want to move away from the 4-3 cross-rhythms a bit. I guess it is the backbone to rave music, but still.

Do you mean the X--X--X- figure?

Also quite common in Amen based DnB.

  On 3/18/2012 at 7:59 AM, psn said:

Do you mean the X--X--X- figure?

 

Also quite common in Amen based DnB.

Yeah, I think. The chorus of Till The World Ends is a good example, although it's not really rave. At about 50 seconds.

OK, that's a more pronounced cross beat than the figure I was thinking about, since polymetric goes on into the next bar. The jungle figure usually aligns with the next downbeat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4mgzMAwlNI

What would rave be without that rhythm? Sure, it's a cliche, but it's awesome.

  On 3/18/2012 at 9:45 AM, modey said:

Sure, it's a cliche, but it's awesome.

imo that's the case with a lot of these. if it ain't broke, don't fix it. nothing wrong with taking a good formula and running with it, as long as you add something new.

i think the sine wave microtonal soundsis getting to be a little cliched but even tho i kinda still like it its has been 'done' as such

80's vibe indie bands who are either trying to sound like battles or fuck buttons or a half arsed version of the animal collective with loads if drums over very simple climatic arrangements

also the new hipster kraut rock esque retro analogue modular noodlings on limited edition boomkat releases are becomming a bit common but for those who got into it after the first time round its nothing radical

  On 3/18/2012 at 9:45 AM, modey said:

What would rave be without that rhythm? Sure, it's a cliche, but it's awesome.

Yeah, that's true. It's kind of rave's signature thing that separates it from other dance music, anyway.

Great thread guys. I am thinking of making a compilation of all these cliches and just posting them on my blog.

SOme things I´ve noticed about people on SOundcloud

-Excesive use of synths where the only active oscillator has got a sine waveform going on.

-Repeating the same goddamn idea for around 2 minutes.

-Coming up with only 4 different beat patterns and exploiting them.

-Not "cleaning" field recordings to make them sound more crisp.

-Uploading just about everything they think sounds good. Mostly 1.20 minutes long

-Using Nexus presets

-Using the same kick sound everybody is using because Deadmau5 does it.

-Damn that pacman mix is the most annoying thing I´ve heard this week.

-Talking basses or supersaw-based bass sounds.

-Do you use FL studio? The first preset of the fruity delay bank. That´s all I´ll say.

-People still using the 808-clap.

-Dry drums.

-Electronic tunes with piano lines on them that have no velocity of "feel" at all, because it´s just 127 127 127 all the time.

-People using 3-note chords

-i VI iv i progressions