Your super music group

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Dis
Is a heavily distorted electric guitar a real instrument?

The electric guitar basically plays the traditional role of violin. What distortion gives is sustain - a long decay on the sound. The bow of a violin does the same thing. The other thing that a bow has in common with the electric guitar is volume. For an acoustic instrument, the violin is a loud fecker.

[Frozzy]

Re: Re: Your super music group

Originally posted by germanos

Tony Levin

and you hook him up with

David Gilmour

un****ingbeleivable

Levin was a session musician on the later Floyd albums (AMLOR and DB)

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Asher
Mercury was campy, to be sure, which is why a lot of people feel threatened by him. You'd have to be crazy to say he was a bad singer, he had a big range and was one of the best singers in rock n' roll history.

True dat. He was "so gay" in the best of sense.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Hueij
Freddy Mercury, wasn't he the singer of one of those bombastic, overproduced bands from the 70's? One of the reasons punk got invented?

Queen did a good punk tune in 1977 iirc. I don't consider them all that overproduced either by the standards of the times, they easily reproduced almost everything on their studio albums live.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Dis
no they weren't. People say that about every decade. They said the same thing about the 70's.

so when did any good music come out then?

The problem is people only seem to count the bad music. Bad music for the masses (mainly teenage girls) comes out every decade. New Kids on the Block in the 80's, Backstreet Boys and n sync in the 90's. In the 00's I guess we got Britney spears. I'm not sure who else as I don't pay attention to pop music anymore.

The eighties were worse than usual though, at least for mainstream music. I can hardly stand any of the crap that was on the radio back then. It was so crappy that people eventually invented "alternative" rock radio. The 80s was Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince. Gack!

[Drake Tungsten]

Lead vocals - Kenny Loggins
Backup vocals/keyboard - Michael McDonald
Lead Guitar - Jeff "Skunk" Baxter
Rhythm Guitar - John Oates
Bass - Walter Becker
Drums - Jeff Porcaro
Flute - Ian Anderson

[Drake Tungsten]

And Prince and Michael Jackson are both amazing.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
I'll tell you what was wrong with the eighties. Two things - synthesisers instead of guitars, and crappy drum samples.

In the late 80's I was in a punky guitar band (like I'm in today) and some people said "oh, guitars are so dated, so seventies". Within three years guitars were back and 15 years later they're still here. So the eighties got that wrong.

Even worse than tacky 80's synths (DX7, anyone?) were the godawful 8-bit drum samples that became fashionable. Sampling technology was in its infancy, and to many of our ears at the time, the cheesy snare-drums that suddenly every producer 'had to have' sounded bloody terrible, and we had to fight tooth and nail in studios to actually use real drums, which producers at the time were reluctant to let stuff out of their studios with.

Eventually, the entire industry came to recognise that the drum samples they had been using sounded atrocious, and they were consigned to the dustbin of history. These days, of course, we can sample things properly, but the fashion fetish with a primative and premature technology has left a grim layer of musical archeology, that some of us are proud never to have sullied ourself with.

I agree with a lot of what you remember about the 80s. If anything I hate the ubiquitous bad synth sounds on so much of that completely forgettable pop-rock more than you. It makes my skin crawl even today, and I'm someone who has the greatness of heart to have largely forgiven the excesses of disco enough to enjoy the occasional tune when I hear one on the radio. But I think you go too far in condemning the DX7. There were some great sounds that came out of that machine, and it isn't the fault of the machine that it was popular enough to have been badly used by a legion of forgotten hair bands on their recordings.

Ditto the sampled drums, though some groups got them right. "Walking in your Footsteps" by the Police for example has some great synthesized drums on it, so good that yours truly lost a bet over whether they were real or fake back in the day.

Looking back the problem in the 80s was largely the exhaustion of the artistic and financial impetus which had started in the 1960s. A lot of musicians retired, and there had been little investment in musicians by the record companies in the late 1970s. The inevitable result was a recession in the record industry, and their reaction was to revert in many ways to cheap, pre-Beatles industry S.O.P. This is why we saw the return of the mega-star with one name (Madonna, Prince) rather than the egalitarian band names which made up the vast majority of records sold previously. Another sad reflection of this trend was the replacement of an album cover with several original works of art with an often colorless cover with photos of "the star".

The upshot of all this was that much of the best music of the 80s was put out by smaller or brand new labels, and very little of it got much radio play. Much of the important music of the 80s is unknown in the culture at large because it was inaccessible to those who weren't searching for it, and had the time to hang out at a lot of clubs or with friends swapping records.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
And Prince and Michael Jackson are both amazing.

In a way I agree, especially about Prince. MJ has a great voice, but I don't like his music. He is also a great dancer, but again I don't care for his music. Prince has amazing musical talents playing, arranging, producing etc. But again his music in the 80s wasn't my bag. His "new" album is promising though, heard a cut on the local jazz station a couple of weeks ago.

Btw, I saw Ian Anderson live about a year and a half ago and he was fantastic as usual.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by reds4ever
I'll always be indebted to the 80s, the music was that bad I got into 60s Soul music and R&B. Most people in my school were buying Erasure and Spandau Ballet, I was buying Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett ....

I bought a fortune in 60s and 70s music on the cheap in used record bins in the 1980s. It was a golden opportunity.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Hueij
Freddy Mercury, wasn't he the singer of one of those bombastic, overproduced bands from the 70's? One of the reasons punk got invented?

Die, punky, die!

[Chemical Ollie]

Nikko McBrain
Gene Crupa
Phil Collins
Ian Paice

And one more guy on cowbell!

Imagine the noise they would make!

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie

Phil Collins

And one more guy on cowbell!

Imagine the noise they would make!

No thanks.

[Cort Haus]

Right then.

Hugh Cornwell
Jean-Jacques Burnel
Dave Greenfield
Jet Black

[Kontiki]

A more contemporary version:

Vocals - Steven Tyler
Lead Guitar - John Squire
Rhythm Guitar - Izzy Stradlin
Drums - Travis Barker
Bass - Flea