A Music Thread

[C0ckney]

anyway, back to the music. my latest productions are here, i've finally finished a couple of beats i've been working on for a while. i think i'm getting better. let me know what you think.

http://soundcloud.com/our-man-in-brasil

[Al B. Sure!]

well i was talking about music in general. i hear what you are saying about gil scott-heron, but like i said, jamie has taken it in a different direction and that's what cool about it.

for some artists obviously, the voice is the most important instrument. for others it's not important at all. most fall somewhere in the middle. take for example one of my favourite bands, joy division. it's true that ian curtis' vocals are very important, vital in fact, but the joy division sound required the guitar of bernard sumner, the bass of peter hook and the drums of stephen morris. the point is that the whole package was important, if you take one element away then it's not joy division anymore and the vocals are simply one of the elements.

And that's a big difference between rock bands and other forms of music... You buy a Teddy Pendergrass record... who's playing the instruments? Teddy got the top-billing and it was his songs. Nobody cares about the guy playing the drums.

[C0ckney]

but it's also the case in jazz or in most forms of electronic music. the instruments are usually the most important things.

[Al B. Sure!]

anyway, back to the music. my latest productions are here, i've finally finished a couple of beats i've been working on for a while. i think i'm getting better. let me know what you think.

http://soundcloud.com/our-man-in-brasil

Okay, after your kind words with respect to my stuff, I'm hesitant to honestly evaluate your music because I don't know what techno music is supposed to sound like or their ideas on song structure. So take this all as someone who knows nothing and has no interest in the kind of music you make but hey, there's got to be some value in ignorance and fresh ears

threeohthree... what's with the really brief melody that is scattered throughout? Why did you cut that so short after a few notes? Felt like a tease.

As Novas Aventuras (Acid mix) was much better. The change up at 1:20 I didn't really like though. Was a little off-putting. Too busy for my tastes at 4 minutes in. Maybe that's par for the course in this type of music, though, but the first 2 minutes were good. Very good. And I much preferred that. That's rappable, baby

Moog Dub... no. no. It sounded like a perpetual intro. After two minutes of it, I saw it was 7 minutes long so skipped ahead checking it at different intervals but always had this teasing to it where I'm like okay... let the beat drop... okay... any second now, it's going to explode into something... never did. There was a tease at 1:18 but it went nowhere.

Sucrilho... take out that thing or change the sample... I don't know what it is. It stopped briefly at 52 seconds and again at 1:35 but then you put it back in, in a slightly fuller form the second time through. it's a regular rhythm that sounds like a cd skip. It is distracting and sounds really bad. The rest of the track sounds like too much experimentation. A few notes of the little honkey-tonk sounds a little more than 2 minutes in then the random strings at 2:30. Too much randomness. Maybe that's the type of music you make and it's supposed to be like that but my thing is you should do something with it not sound like you're all over the place like a guy ****ing around on an MPC controller. Once again, teasing seems to be what you like to do You never make a melody longer than about 4 notes, it seems.

Space Mix... oh I see... it's a spaced out futuristic sounding version of the other one. I like the Acid one better. Okay the UFO effect was a bit of a distraction and the beginning of it didn't sound good at all. I guess you want it for the space theme but around 2:00, it just sounded bad and annoying. Then in the 3rd minute it just seemed to fight the beat.

What samples are you using? The FL Studio defaults are That's what those are, right?


EDIT: Ignore my initial comments about the Acid Mix at 1:20. I was tripping. It still sounds weird to me but it's not literally off as far as I can tell.

[C0ckney]

cheers al. i appreciate the feedback, it's nice to hear it, from the perspective of someone who doesn't listen to that sort of music.

threeofthree was an experiment, i just used an 808 drum machine and 303 synth to make all the sounds. the little synth is a tease, the main lead is the acid line which starts at 1:16.

as novas aventuras de...(acid mix), this is probably the best thing i've made so far, it works, a lot of people i've played it to say that they like it. i don't think there's any change at 1:20...the rhythm is constant. also the lead for this is very long, in fact no part really repeats, who says i don't write long melodies

as novas aventuras de...(space mix), in many ways this is an improvement on the other mix, i feel the drum sound a little better and the bass is all in key. however, the acid mix sounds better to my ears too.

moog dub, that's how it's meant to sound but yeah i need to work on how i make dubstep tracks.

sucriliho, i wasn't very happy with how this sounded, i tried for quite a long time to finish this track, but i could never quite get it right. i wanted to get it 'finished' in order to start work making some new ideas i've had recently.

again thank you for taking the time to listen and give some feedback

[Al B. Sure!]

I played around with FL Studio for a few nights in January. I got making a basic beat down but that's easy anyway. Adding melodies and stuff throws me off. It always sounds to me like the melody is fighting the beat or is on top of the beat. I don't know. I need to practice more but I got kind of frustrated and stopped messing with it.

I just put up 6 little 12-20 second beats... no melodies. Just loops I guess.

http://soundcloud.com/ramseya/sets/randomloops

[R1zbear]

Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan

[C0ckney]

the membranes - spike milligan's tape recorder

and something rather different...



belle and sebastian - judy and the dream of horses

[Al B. Sure!]

Why am I posting this? Yes, it's terrible. Beyond terrible.

The reason I'm posting this is because of the hilarious like-dislike ratio on youtube (1,737 likes and 25,895 dislikes as of right now)...

Don't listen to it (please do not subject yourself to that!). Just hear a little bit of it to take in how bad it is. This is cultural history



I actually pity her a little now

[C0ckney]

kode 9 - babylon (dub mix)

[Al B. Sure!]

Cockney, would that Kim Kardashian song be considered 'techno'? What do you call people like Lady Gaga and Kesha? The music sounds like techno.

[C0ckney]

****ing hell that was dire albert.

it's pop music, and really bad music at that. obviously in pop music you get a lot of watered down versions of other types of music. people like lady gaga look at what's popular and make something based on that, just like madona used to. the track above, well it's hard to call it anything other than ****, but the ideas come from house music, in the case of lady gaga, clearly she's been influenced by electro house.

in my opinion, the best pop music comes from people who are committed to make pop music (see for example britney spear's last two albums), rather than people who are simply trying to sell a watered down version of something else.

[Thoth]

the membranes - spike milligan's tape recorder

Membranes

Spike Milligan




(not a music video, but a classic nonetheless)

[Al B. Sure!]

Wale before he blew up. He had a free Seinfeld-themed mixtape.

[Thoth]

More Spike Milligan: