________________________________________________________________________ 2005.10.21 Latency - Made an art in Carrillon music I admit it: I'm an instrument-quality complainer. I don't believe today's MIDI gear holds a candle to the electroacoustic axes of yesteryear, or the acoustic axes of the 'year' before that, in terms of musical expressiveness (disclaimer: piano is my main instrument). With the VST explosion, our digital synths are finally as expressive as we can dream, but our controllers haven't improved much since 1985. MIDI keyboards are less expensive, more reliable, smaller and less heavy than anything that's come before. And these are good reasons to use them. But most artists who can afford to tote and maintain electroacoustics do so. Why? Possible explanations include: the MIDI serial bus is slow, most controllers don't output anywhere near the 128 levels of velocity allowed by MIDI, and polyphonic aftertouch and release velocity never went mainstream (and aren't available at all today). These are all legitimate gripes, and I hope industry giants and tiny startups alike will address them. But sometimes, griping can stand in the way of creativity. And I got a lesson in that today as I walked past the famous carillon atop UC Berkeley's Sather Tower (better known as "the Campanile") during its daily noontime workout. For the uninitiated, carillons are batteries of bells, controlled, often by mechanical linkage, from something that looks like an organ console (usually including pedals). Except the keys are huge and you play them with your fists. When you play a note, you must wait a good part of a second for it to sound, and you must wait until the bell returns to repeat it. I would scoff at any MIDI keyboard with such limitations. But there's a wonderful body of music for carillon! What's going on? What's going on is, carillon players didn't balk at the limitations of their instrument. They recognized its potential beauty and made an artform of realizing it. Imagine having to play three keys before the first one sounds at a moderate upbeat tempo... sounds like the perfect zen exercise to me. Learning to play under such a constraint would probably make us all better musicians. Another limitation we'd never accept on a MIDI keyboard is the lack of velocity. Surprise! The harpsichord has an enormous body of killer music and no velocity sensitivity to speak of. Last but not least, witness the recent popularity of '8-bit' synthesis. There's unquestionably something unique in the limitations of early digital synths. A recent Wired article quotes Nicholas Collins, head of the sound department at The Art Institute of Chicago: ""Electronic instruments had been around long enough that you could finally be nostalgic about them. I can't imagine it's cost-effective. You can probably get a decent Mac for not much more than you'd pay for a decent vintage machine. To imitate the wave forms of these older computers would take like 20 minutes of work. But the fact that it's vintage, that you got it at a Goodwill shop, that's the whole thing: the fetishism of the machine."" He misses the point entirely. Yes, you could make a Mac sound like a Commodore 64, but nobody would have thought (or sufferred) to do it had the Mac come first. It took instruments with real limitations to inspire the fantastic body of video game music we have. The moral, I suppose, is that MIDI controllers and soft synths together comprise a new type of instrument, ready to push the frontiers of performance art. Don't let its limitations put you off -- later on, they may even seem essential. -Carl ________________________________________________________________________ 2005.11.17 A closer look at the music of Yes, Part 1 Yes Harmony The music of "classic" Yes is a favorite among keyboard players, at least because keyboardist Rick Wakeman had such a prominent role in it, and an outgoing stage presence that helped make keyboards famous in rock. (If you're not familiar with Yes, go out and pick up a copy of the _Yessongs_ double-CD live album right away!) While Wakeman contributed synth sweeps, flashy riffs, and episodic songwriting, it was largely the Anderson/Squire/Howe team that fashioned Yes' unique harmonic style. Yes harmonies follow some atypical rules, found in only one other musicial style that I know of: a particular brand of neoclassicism due to Hindemith, and a group of composers known as "Les Six"... Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983) Louis Durey (1888–1979) Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) Georges Auric (1899–1983) I put Honegger at the top because his music is perhaps the most consistently Yes-like of the group. Some of the composers -- Poulenc, for example -- tend to sound more "French" than Yes. Milhaud is remarkable because he wrote huge amounts music in very different styles. Though he's most famous for his use of polytonality (playing in two different key at once), only a minority of his work uses that technique. Much of his chamber music sounds like Yes, harmonically. Just what kind of harmony is this? I've broken it down to six bullet items (I swear this was a coincidence), in order from most important to least important... (1) Favor major over minor (2) Favor triads over extended chords (3) Modulate by 3rds and 2nds as well as 4ths and 5ths (4) When extending major triads, favor 9ths over 7ths (5) Minor triads may be extended with 7ths (6) Use dominant-7th and augmented chords sparingly Let's see how these work in a few famous Yes songs... Dear Father -------------------------------------------------- (F D Bb Amin7 Gmin7 Eb Fadd9 G) Here are the books... (G C Dmin Emin G Amin7 Dmin F Dmin) If there's anything... When you take... (C F Bb) Dear Father... I'm not feeling good ... should Starship Trooper - Life Seeker -------------------------------------------------- (A C F Bb Ab F) Speak to me of summer... The Gates of Delirium -------------------------------------------------- (G Cadd9 E C D) (G D) Stand and Fight... And ride there... (A C) Choose and renounce... Based on my experience hearing and transcribing these progressions, I came up with two of my own... College -------------------------------------------------- (G Bmin Cadd9 Bbadd9 F A D Emin7) Norman Henry -------------------------------------------------- (D9 Bb9 FMaj7 A9) Play through these progressions and see if you can spot the six bullet items at work. And stay tuned for Part 2! -Carl ________________________________________________________________________ 2005.11.29 A closer look at the music of Yes, Part 2 Liner Notes Action! If you pick up a recording of classical music and look at the liner notes, chances are you'll find an essay by a musicologist. It will usually say something about the life and times of the composer, and something about the structure of the music. In my younger days I collected dozens of classical recordings and pored over their liner notes while listening. It's the next best thing to a musicology degree, and it will get you laid just about as infrequently. Allow me to demonstrate by attempting to write liner notes for some classic Yes tunes.^1 Yes is especially appropriate for this treatment since their music is classically inspired (Sibelius and Stravinsky in particular). In fact, along the lines of Martin 1996, I'd describe their "main sequence" (1971-1977)^2 output as symphonic tone poems, transcribed for chamber ensemble and three (usually only two) vocalists. Don't worry if you haven't a clue what this means. In musicology we never explain what we mean, because we really don't mean anything -- the whole thing is just a code, and the fun is in cracking it. And the way to do that is to read a whole lot of it. The life and times stuff usually covers things like when and where the music was written, and which wars were taking place. For example: Beethoven composed his third symphony in 1803, when the French revolution was in full swing. He intended to title it the "Bonaparte Symphony," but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven renamed the symphony "Eroica," which means "heroic." The piece saw its first public performance under that name in Vienna in 1805. As boring as this kind of backstory is, classic rock is getting long enough in the tooth to warrant it, as the liner notes to many recent reissues attest. But I'm going to skip it and go straight to the structure discussion. Hopefully we all know that the war taking place at the time was Vietnam. Discussing the structure of a piece of music is like giving a timeline for it: chorus, verse, chorus, and so on. Some folks get annoyed by the fact that such descriptions don't really explain anything about what makes music great (or not). This is an important criticism to keep in mind, but it's not damning. The point of such descriptions is to enhance appreciation, and maybe just to have some fun -- not to tell composers what to do. So let's have a look at some "main sequence" Yes pieces... "The Clap" is a novelty rag by Steve Howe, recorded live and introduced on _The Yes Album_ (1971). Steve's guitar technique is strained and brutal, even to the point of being endearing. The original title was "Clap," but somewhere this was printed as "The Clap" and the name stuck. The closing track on _The Yes Album_ is "Perpetual Change." The opening riff of "Perpetual Change" is in five, leading to the main theme which I count in alternating bars of six and eight. Then the verses in plain six. A new riff, in seven, is introduced at 5:10, and soon played together with the main theme; 6+8 = 7+7. "The Remembering" is the second 'movement' of 1973's _Tales From Topographic Oceans_, an 80-minute work inspired by Stravinsky's _The Rite of Spring_. At least one author has argued that _Tales_ is the most important work in rock music.^3 Without a doubt it contains some epic themes. The writing is largely episodic. Here's a 'thematic schematic' for "The Remembering"... [Out in the City] Sail, in 7 Ours, in 4 9ths, in 4 [ ol. = ol ] Ours, in 4 [ ol = ol. ] 9ths, in 4 [ ol. = ol ] --- Sail, in 7 [ ol = ol. ] Stand, in 4 Out in the City, in 4 Stand, in 4 Out in the City, in 4 --- Don the Cap, in 3 Relayer, in 7/8 Don the Cap, in 3 Relayer, in 7/8 Sail, in 7 Relayer, in 7/8 --- Stand, in 4 Out in the City, in 4 --- Ours, in 4 9ths, in 4 [ ol. = ol ] "To Be Over," appearing on the 1974 album _Relayer_, is one of my favorite pieces of music. The opening features a loose contrapuntal structure, suggesting what we might call a "double chaconne". The chorus for me achieves the kind of earned simplicity that's present, for example, in the "Ode to Joy" of Beethoven's ninth symphony. It's simple, beautiful, original, and anyone could come up with it in an afternoon. But very few artists could "pull it off" -- deliever it with significance. The ensuing instrumental achieves a bizarre mixture of country and psychedelic rock. An 'antichorus' next, whose chord progression is loosely an Aeolian or Phrygian version of the main chorus, broken by a nice contrapuntal interlude by guitar and keyboards. At last, all the bits of the chaconne are woven together in the song's grand climax, the scale of which is reminiscent of (and I dare say greater than) Tchaikovsky's famous '1812 Overture'. -------------------------------------------------- Notes 1. Any good musicology essay has at least one footnote. 2. I prefer a 1971-1974 main sequence. Despite "Awaken," I feel we can not include _Going For the One_ without _Tormato_. I love both albums, but they are clearly the product of a different time and place than the main sequence work. Likewise, we cannot have _Close to the Edge_ without _Tales From Topographic Oceans_ and the _Relayer_, as some are wont to do. And unlike almost everyone, I would prefer to omit _Fragile_, but it's safely sandwiched between the _The Yes Album_ and _Close to the Edge_. 3. Mosbo, Thomas. Yes - But What Does It Mean? 1994 -------------------------------------------------- Further Reading Martin, Bill. Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock. Open Court Publishing Company, 1996. Morse, Tim. Yesstories: Yes In Their Own Words St. Martin's Griffin, 1996. -Carl ________________________________________________________________________ 2005.12.30 Prog is not a Style Here's a thesis: Somewhere along the way, prog seems to have been confused with heavy metal. Particularly metal featuring an over-reliance on repeated figures and transparently-deliberate extended meters. Others seem to confuse prog with its "Canterbury" subgenre. But prog had little to do with time signatures or augmented chords. Its essence was nothing more than experimentalism. And there's very little experimental about most neo-prog today. Instead, we find havens of experimentalism in the jamband scene (first and foremost Phish), indie rock (Modest Mouse, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah...), and electronica (numerous). 'Follow not in the footsteps of great men. Rather, seek what they sought.' -Carl ________________________________________________________________________ 2006.01.12 Microphone Comparison Saw this on AudioMastermind this morning: http://www.fxguidry.com/mictest1/ Finally, a microphone test done properly! My observations: AKG 535 - huge treble boost. Behringer ECM5000 - supposedly flat; I use these for everything. Neumann TLM 103 - moderate treble boost, bass boost due to cardiod pattern? Neumann KM 184 - same as TLM 103, but with more cowbell... I mean, bass. Oktava MC012 cardioid - ridiculous treble boost Oktava MC012 omni - sounds like treble cut! Clearly the best sound, unless you just can't sing, is the ECM5000. But even if you can't sing to save your life... why build an EQ into a microphone? This is the kind of thing that should be done in software. Or, even in the old days, in hardware. -Carl ________________________________________________________________________