Karaoke Forums

A few of my opinions on the Music scene - Nobody asked, many may not agree, but here they are

1) The day the music died was the day autotune was released.

2) There are a finite number of musical notes and chords.
Out of that number, there are only so many combinations that are complimentary.
The actual melodic combinations have pretty much all been discovered, recorded, and copyrighted.
By and large, the only musical combinations left to explore are the ones that should NEVER be inflicted on human ears.
Just because you can . . . doesn't mean you should.
Attempting to stay viable, the recording industry is forced to push the unlistenable drivel on the public via mind games, creating demand via Emperor's clothes syndrome.

3) The recording industry's stranglehold on artists and total cluelessness when it comes to dealing with people who genuinely have a gift. Artists and Corporate culture are one of the best examples of the term diametrically opposed. Artists are by nature proactive, Corporations are reactive. When Corporations try to be hip and proactive, they invariably go 3L - Ludicrous, Laughable, and just plain Lousy.

4) The only true-true artists in my book are the songwriters/arrangers.
Singers - Anyone who runs Karaoke knows at least one singer who does a song as well or better than the original artist.
Musician - A bit harder than the Singer to emulate, but there are very few who have no equal when it comes to performing a song.
Songwriter/Arranger - This is where the rubber hits the road. To be able to combine words and music into an art form. These are the TRUE artists and they are woefully underappreciated by the public and the music industry.

^^^^^^ what he said ^^^^^

this forum would be more awesome if...

i agree w/ an earlier poster who mentioned games.

i like to play the song title game and/or the musical artist game, too. where someone comes up with a song title to start. let's say "sexual healing". the next poster riffs on that title with their response "heal the world" and then someone else follows up with "everybody wants to rule the world" and so on and so on. you can do it with artists too, though it gets more challenging with artists. and try not to repeat.

but i think the greatest thing for forums is DIVERSITY. let's not talk down to anyone or make folks feel bad for having strange thoughts or for not being as intelligent. once you force those folks to leave, the place becomes boring. try to see things from other crazy points of view. at least be respectful to it...

I like this post. I don't know if I agree with all of it but it's well reasoned and makes for a good argument. I'm curious as to why you think that autotune is responsible for the day the music died. After all we've been tuning vocals in the studio for years before autotune was invented. Ya don't think all these "artists" who thought that pitch was an event in a baseball game and that couldn't stay in tune in a live venue somehow magically had perfect pitch in the studio now do you? Or is it because like any effect or signal processing function it gets overused and abused?

Indeed there are a finite number of musical notes (12 to be exact in Western music) but I don't agree that the combinations are limited, especially when you add the rhythmic component, the combinations are infinite. If you were just to take the combinations of quarter notes alone in a chromatic scale the possible combinations are 8,916,100,448,256. Add to that number the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities and I wouldn't even know where to begin to do the math so I don't think we've even scratched the surface of "melodic combinations". As far as things that should never be inflicted on human ears, well that really is rather subjective. Some might say that about an Ornette Coleman piece, but the tens of thousands of people who bought his albums might disagree.

Here's where I think your post gets really interesting when you opine that the recording industry is forced to push the unlistenable drivel on the public via mind games. Maybe you could elaborate on that. Frank Zappa had once done an interview offering his opinion as to why the music itself seems to be in a constant state of devolution (he blamed the "hip" record execs and A&R people). I have my own views as well, but no matter whose take you go with, they all seem to point toward the same culprit, the record company's management. I'm not sure that I'd agree that they are clueless though when it comes to people who are genuinely gifted. I don't think things like that weigh as heavily as you might think. I think at the end of the day it always ends up as a marketing decision. It's all about the money. I think a good example that illustrates that point is to look at some of the gifted jazz and/or classical players. Chris Potter is one of my favorite jazz saxophonists and is a monster who's incredibly gifted, but how many of you have ever heard of him? i would agree with you though that the terms "artist" and "corporate culture" are mutually exclusive terms, but that's nothing new and has existed since time immemorial. Just look at Picasso or Van Gogh who are among the countless number of great artists who have only achieved their recognition and success posthumously.

To me a true artist is someone who has learned the rules of his/her craft, then creatively and intelligently goes outside of those rules to create their work. It could be a painter, a composer, a musician, a vocalist or even a carpenter. I wouldn't limit art to any discipline or in any of its forms. To me at least, it's more about how you can creatively mold your craft no matter what it is.
Singers ... there are singers and there are singers. Oddly enough there was never a shortage of accomplished musicians to choose from. Granted I'm fortunate enough to be in the Boston area where musicians from all over the world come to attend schools like Berkeley and New England Conservatory and even Julliard. Singers on the other hand were always at a premium. I personally went to many different venues attempting to recruit singers for our recordings. I tried lead singers from bands, and gazillions of karaoke singers and during that whole time that I was recruiting them, I found only one person who I would actually consider to be a singer, and he was one of the karaoke singers that I personally hadn't heard but had been recommended by a fellow musician who had spoke very highly of him. Real singers come to the studio prepared, understand harmony and possess good intonation, and can read charts and lead sheets. There are numerous singers in bands and karaoke venues who can sing certain songs like nobody's business, but once outside of their comfort zone with a song that they aren't that familiar with, or doesn't suit their voice, then it becomes a long session and my engineers weren't happy. The biggest problem however is intonation. You don't notice it as much in a live venue because going off pitch in a live gig is transient. However when it's recorded, it has a cumulative effect and each time you hear it, it becomes more obvious to the point where you begin to cringe. You can help the track along with a bit of autotune, but when it's to the point where you almost have to leave the autotune on from start to finish, the end product isn't pretty, and when you're cranking out 27 to 36 songs/month, the engineers don't have time to micro-edit vocal tracks.
Musicians .... same thing here. There are musicians and there are musicians. I've heard some pretty bad musicians that earn a living from it that could call themselves professionals, but are really a disgrace to the word musician. Fortunately there are so many great players out there that it sort of makes up for the slugs.
Songwriters/Arrangers ... I'm going with the arrangers here. A good arranger can make even a mediocre song a hit. Lots of examples here but you get the point.

I would agree however, far too often it's not the public that makes the initial determination on what is "art."
Often, it's only art because the artist says it art. Like Andy Warhol's painting of a Campbell Soup can.... to me, that's not "art" at all. It's a painting of a soup can and that's it but the public for some reason that escapes me, went crazy over it.

I had a friend in high school that could sit down at a piano and magically make something pleasing come out. He wasn't a musician and he really didn't have a clue what he was doing not to mention that he had never had a piano lesson in his life, nor could he play the same tune twice. It was like sitting a monkey in front of a keyboard.... except what came out was somehow rather pleasing.

I understand that each person has their own tastes and preferences, and I'm certainly not a Picasso lover by a longshot and jazz music tends to sound like a random combination of notes that seem to go well together -- just like my classmate in high school. He was what I would call a true "accidental musician."

Art is arbitrarily subjective so who better to declare it as being art other than the artist who created it? The public doesn't have to accept it, and indeed, often times it doesn't, but the public isn't always the best judge either. If they were we wouldn't have so many posthumously famous artists. Your Andy Warhol example is a perfect example. You see 32 paintings of soup cans, but others can see the art as being in the process of painting them. it's probably not a good idea for the public at large to be deciding what qualifies as being art. I'm no connoisseur of art so naturally there are a lot of things for which I don't have an appreciation, the reason for which is almost always due to a lack of understanding of what the artist was trying to portray. The other danger of qualifying works of art as legitimately being art, is the potential loss of copyright protection. If it ain't art it can't be copyrighted.