From Peter Hollo Sent Mon, Oct 19th 1998, 05:16
I totally agree with Che about bass tuning - even the totally great Amon Tobin has absolutely horribly out of tune bass sometimes. What's more, sometimes a session musician will be brought in and will tune to the (out of tune) bass, and then end up on the final product being out of tune themselves - e.g. the flute part in Saint Etienne's "Mario's Cafe" (1st track on "So Tough") which drives not only me and my brother but a lot of other people utterly crazy because it's so pronouncedly flat. I noticed recently (I think...) that it's actually fairly in tune with the bass part - it's just that the keyboards and stuff are sharp, so when it's on radio or smaller speakers you don't hear the bass very much. I think it's not so much the flute player's fault as something in production like I described above. And hey, Brian Flanagan, how sad can you get? People discuss electronic musical instruments, sample cutting up techniques and so on on this list, and this is just as important to making good music. I certainly appreciate knowing whether a CD will have out of tune samples - rather than much of the uninformative crap we usually read in CD reviews, this tells me something about the music, and a thread about it seems completely appropriate to me. Anal? I don't think so. Perhaps you think so because you're tone deaf, in which case it's like a colour blind person going "For god's sake, stop all this anal babbling about red and green, who cares?" Yeah, finished, Peter. -- Peter Hollo xxxxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx http://www.fourplay.com.au/me.html FourPlay - Eclectic Electric String Quartet http://www.fourplay.com.au "Of course, dance music can be a music where you lie on your back and your brain cells dance" -Michael Karoli of Can, quoted in Wire mag.