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Old 09-21-2016, 09:47 AM   #41
Judders
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Yep I could use anything at my dispose though, rhythm and pitch etc. That was 20 years ago, I should really do it some again, makes your brain hurt but that just means you are advancing.
My musical partner and I played a fun game a few times - you take a well known song and play the phrasing but with random intervals, so if the pitch of the melody goes up, you go up by a random interval. It's amazing how easily people could identify the songs even though the notes were entirely different.
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Old 09-21-2016, 09:49 AM   #42
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Yep I could use anything at my dispose though, rhythm and pitch etc. That was 20 years ago, I should really do it some again, makes your brain hurt but that just means you are advancing.
That's my random knock on a lot of home produced music tbh, that almost everything else is there, the mix is good, the lyrics are good enough, etc, etc,... but I quite literally often don't "feel" anything at all. Don't feel happy, or sad, or anything else in between.

It often enough becomes more an exercise in technical subjectivity, "good job, nice mix, etc, etc", not so much a musical experience.

It's the rare home recording person than can pour out his or her emotions in a truly convincing way, without any help from a good producer.
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Old 09-21-2016, 10:02 AM   #43
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That's my random knock on a lot of home produced music tbh, that almost everything else is there, the mix is good, the lyrics are good enough, etc, etc,... but I quite literally often don't "feel" anything at all. Don't feel happy, or sad, or anything else in between.
[ramble]

That's one that I think many who become inspired and want to make music are oblivious to not necessarily by their doing. I have a tune where during the solo a preacher's daughter is getting nailed for the first time by some non-religious dude, I purposley used a walking flat five progression during that part and a few other elements because I wanted to reflect both the implied evilness and sexual primal urge. That doesn't make it a great tune but at least there is thought behind what occurs.

I'd not have thought of such things when I was 17 but most everything I do now I try to think of it in those terms instead of "this chord sounds good", it's certainly fine if it sounds good but better if you know emotionally why and if you have an intention vs just shot gunning for something that seems like it might be a hit LOL. YMMV of course but intention doesn't hurt.

[/ramble]
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Old 09-21-2016, 10:05 AM   #44
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If you think about it, this holds true for many (if not most) of the performing arts.

We all knew that (for example) Denzel Washington is not a criminal cop in that movie, but the performance was damn convincing. Convincing enough that for that 90 minutes or whatever we were deep into it despite already knowing that it's not real.

Take that "believe-ability" away and the movie is mostly just violent crap. Same goes for Ethan Hawke in that movie, you believed he was that guy getting setup, you could feel it as it happened.

Same holds true for music (where or when emotion matters), if I don't actually believe it for those 3 minutes, it's not that entertaining. Motown, back in the day, knew that. Their artists, especially their male lead singers, made you believe it, and the music always supported it.

P.S. Part of that is to suggest that as talented as those people are, they still require other people to do their best, great directors, great writers, etc, etc. Which is why you see some really good actors like the lethal weapon guy doing really crappy B movies with really shitty performances on USA.

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Old 09-21-2016, 02:11 PM   #45
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Well I guess some of us who have spent years transposing songs into all sorts of different keys so the singer can get to the notes but who have never noticed that the character of the song has completely changed might think they're talking rubbish.

Though no doubt in the days when that idea was prevalent composers wrote tunes that reflected what they thought appropriate for the key in question.
I think transposition does not change the mood much because the piece wasn't written for that key. My guess is that certain keys lend themselves naturally to melodies and chord progressions that invoke the particular emotions generally accepted by Western music. But, that is probably true because what "sounds good" in a key is relative to what one has heard played before in said key.

Key alone is just not enough to convey an emotion. It has to be combined with tempo, melody direction, dynamics, and possibly most important, which accidentals are used.

Horror movie music is the easiest to illustrate this. They play a lot of off-key notes, add increasing tempo, and volume together which is interpreted as building anxiety toward impending danger. I think some of that is instinctual. We use volume to judge distance and slight variations in pitch to discern direction. When a sound appears to be approaching and its exact location or source can't be determined then that is naturally scary. People are naturally afraid of what they hear and cannot comprehend. It is scary enough to hear a bear in the woods, but it is that much scarier if you cannot tell which direction the bear is coming from due to echoes off the nearby cliff face. But, the sound is getting louder, so you still know the bear is getting closer.

People are typically afraid of sounds they cannot recognize too. That's why horror music historically uses a lot of improvised instruments like bowing a saw or getting crazy with a Theremin, not playing in a musical key at all.

Babies know not to crawl off a cliff edge even if they've never encountered a ravine before. They won't even do it to get to their mother. So, some knowledge is definitely inherited genetically which doesn't require learning.
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Old 09-21-2016, 02:23 PM   #46
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My guess is that certain keys lend themselves naturally to melodies and chord progressions that invoke the particular emotions generally accepted by Western music.
I think keys are generally aligned to the instrumentation. If I'm playing guitar, I'd much rather play something in E or C. If I'm playing a banjo, give me G or give me death. Mando and fiddle players love the people's key of D. Vocally, I'm a G and D guy.

Transposition isn't hard, but it can make it harder to play.
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Old 09-21-2016, 02:29 PM   #47
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I think keys are generally aligned to the instrumentation. If I'm playing guitar, I'd much rather play something in E or C. If I'm playing a banjo, give me G or give me death. Mando and fiddle players love the people's key of D. Vocally, I'm a G and D guy.

Transposition isn't hard, but it can make it harder to play.
It is also a matter of degrees.

Transpose the Jaws theme by a couple of semitones and no-one will notice. Transpose Slayer up 6 tones and the impact will be lost.
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Old 09-21-2016, 03:10 PM   #48
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I think keys are generally aligned to the instrumentation. If I'm playing guitar, I'd much rather play something in E or C. If I'm playing a banjo, give me G or give me death. Mando and fiddle players love the people's key of D. Vocally, I'm a G and D guy.

Transposition isn't hard, but it can make it harder to play.
Good point. As a keyboardists, I don't think about different keys as being physically more difficult to play.

But, for guitar can't one use a capo and/or alternate tunings to accommodate other keys?

I do get that different instruments lend themselves to certain keys and certain melodies. I have dabbled with guitar, bass, and ukulele a little. Arpeggiated, finger-picked guitar chords are particularly difficult for me to play on the keyboard. But, TBH, I'm not that good of a keyboardist, definitely no pianist, and my music theory is elementary at best.
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Old 09-21-2016, 03:11 PM   #49
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If you could... understand something about audio which you've never understood, what would it be?
How to make a living doing it.
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Old 09-21-2016, 03:24 PM   #50
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How to make a living doing it.
Ha!

Best answer yet

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Old 09-21-2016, 03:26 PM   #51
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But, for guitar can't one use a capo and/or alternate tunings to accommodate other keys?
Sometimes. For certain voicing (bluegrass, for example) a capo is fine. For others, not so much. The chord shapes remain the same whether there is a capo or not. No one likes playing C shapes out of first position.
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Old 09-21-2016, 04:40 PM   #52
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Transpose the Jaws theme by a couple of semitones and no-one will notice. Transpose Slayer up 6 tones and the impact will be lost.
Absolutely which just goes to prove, none of this is etched in stone. The trick is to be savvy enough to understand what, when, who, where and why and how to use all of this to your advantage, just looking for non-bending rules of thumb is a fool's game.
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Old 09-22-2016, 12:38 AM   #53
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Ooopsie :-)
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Old 09-22-2016, 12:40 AM   #54
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Originally Posted by Lawrence View Post
It's the rare home recording person than can pour out his or her emotions in a truly convincing way, without any help from a good producer.
Isn't "artist" a profession any more? :-)
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Old 09-22-2016, 12:46 AM   #55
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Ha!

Best answer yet
Awesome, thanks!
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Old 09-22-2016, 12:47 AM   #56
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This is not going in the intended direction but it's really interesting.

Please proceed.
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Old 09-23-2016, 07:25 PM   #57
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I wish I had a better understanding of the electrical engineering side of audio.
Everything useful is a voltage divider. Figure out how the things you're looking at work as a voltage divider, and most of it is handled.

Is there anything specific you're wondering about?
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