From Peter Hollo Sent Mon, Oct 19th 1998, 04:53
From Peter Hollo Sent Mon, Oct 19th 1998, 04:53
(A little while ago) Dave Walker wrote: > The day I ever start to even remotely care about anything like that > someone please kindly take me out back and kindly put a big-assed slug > in the back of my head. > > pretty damned glad to have never > taken courses in music theory, As has been pointed out already, it's got nothing to do with music theory - I studied music at school and have played classical music all my life, and there are others who have studied with me who have absolutely shocking aural skills and remain tone deaf. If you're tone deaf, lucky you (maybe... I'd argue the point) but for those of us who aren't, samples that are out of tune (that's out of tune, not in a different key or something - Stravinsky among many others wrote brilliant bi-tonal music at the start of this century) do indeed have a physical effect - on me, as well as Che and I believe Irene McC, along with many others I'm sure. When there are out of tune elements in a song I can sometimes almost filter it out if it's not too much, but at other times it can make me feel slightly sick (queasy perhaps) and usually ruins a track for me - it ends up getting skipped when I'm listening to an album. Not bothering to make one's samples in tune is as sloppy as badly cutting up samples so that there's clicking, or not aligning samples so that the rhythms don't match (which, unfortunately, is something that marrs a couple of the tracks on Neotropic's otherwise excellent new album). It seriously reduces the effect of a piece of music. It's got nothing to do with musical snobbishness, although I do think that to be proud of one's ignorance is perplexing to say the least. Mostly when a pop musician proudly states that because they have no musical knowledge they can make more innovative music or something, they are nowhere near as interesting and innovative as they think - it's just that they don't know what they're doing, and don't know the historical perpective... By the way Dave - I don't mean to be flaming you at all, this is more about the people who seem to come up with this quite regularly in my experience. ;) Peter. np: Multiphonic Ensemble - King of May (on Sub Rosa). Very Biskesque, and very good - don't know why it hasn't been mentioned pretty much at all; it seems to be copyright 1997. -- 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.