Dave grohl sound city studio movie

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eddiex
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by eddiex » Sun Feb 10, 2013 8:21 am

beats me wrote:Part of the problem for me is we get into presumed "bandwagon hopping" whether it's a hot sound right now or repurposing a sound from the past. Each and every one of us did the same thing when we decided to pursue music. There was a sound we were drawn to and respected and we aimed to emulate it and knew all the formulas, gear, and key players that were involved. So why are we judging the same behavior?
yeah beats, i don't have a problem with any of that.(gear, wanting to get a vintage sound, wanting to emulate) like you said, we have all done it to some extent. the issue i have is when dudes are super strict about it , then are dicks about it....like they are keeping it "more real" than i am or something.
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Machinesworking
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by Machinesworking » Sun Feb 10, 2013 9:41 am

eddiex wrote:
beats me wrote:Part of the problem for me is we get into presumed "bandwagon hopping" whether it's a hot sound right now or repurposing a sound from the past. Each and every one of us did the same thing when we decided to pursue music. There was a sound we were drawn to and respected and we aimed to emulate it and knew all the formulas, gear, and key players that were involved. So why are we judging the same behavior?
yeah beats, i don't have a problem with any of that.(gear, wanting to get a vintage sound, wanting to emulate) like you said, we have all done it to some extent. the issue i have is when dudes are super strict about it , then are dicks about it....like they are keeping it "more real" than i am or something.

I love vintage gear, don't get me wrong, but there's some point where it becomes this "snobby" very fake version of "real". Like a certain sort of Indie Kid with all the stereotypical clothes who thinks he's not wearing a costume....

Angstrom
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by Angstrom » Sun Feb 10, 2013 3:15 pm

Machinesworking wrote:My gut feeling on it is there's a HUGE difference from the sort of cultural and genre data mining Hendrix was doing and say The Stray Cats. There was the beginnings of the sort of time/place/era lifting we see now for a long time, but the band that really just nailed this phenomena for me as a kid was the Stray Cats, an 80's band doing very exclusively 50's rock.
They were good at it and the songs were catchy, but because in the end they added absolutely nothing new to the table, they will be completely forgotten.

With few exceptions the best bands bring together different elements and create something new. The Beatles brought together american blues and rock, English big band melodies, and beer hall pop among other things. Hendrix brought funk, Blues, rock and a bit of crazy experimental acid music among other things.

So, to me anyway, The White Stripes etc. are good craftsmen but bad artists. It's like an exceptionally good painting of a lighthouse and the ocean. Great technique bad art. This doesn't mean they're not fun to listen to but it's kinda like a candy bar compared to a meal.
Theres a spectrum of creative synthesis, running from a group like Stray Cats doing a cheesy pastiche (taking one thing and recreating it with all the integrity of Disneyland) . Higher levels of personal creativity involving the synthesis of several similar items, and then on to many dissimilar items, onward. At that more complex union the variation of influences combine into a new whole.
I agree that some white Swiss guy playing blues is never a black man in the 1950s, but it has its own cultural validity, as a trend. In the same way that geeks on here were excited about a "new" MS20(a seriously limited semi modular now easily surpassed), or might fetishise a 909's retro drum appeal . Appropriation is our culture now. THAT is the authentic culture of of now, so sing me an authentic song about your Studer tape modelling plugin.

Meanwhile : I think everyone is still looking for an outmoded idea, a musical undiscovered tribesman, pure and unique. The noble savage. Untainted by the hypermediated world we look for a pure innocent to appear Authentically singing a singular authentic existentialist song.We say "don't sing like I've heard before, sing like I've never heard before. It can't be authentic if you sing like they did in '50s Tennessee "

The reality of such a mythical un-tainted Authentic beast is :
#1 he doesn't exist, because every thing is connected to everything else now.
#2 if a musical noble savage DID appear his music would have little cultural relevance ( and thats how we value cultural output) our culture is one of deep references.

Our sense of cultural value is based on cultural novelty, but it's very hard to be surprised by a culture these days. The blues was a synthesis which built over decades. We no longer have decades of relative cultural isolation to distil, forget, and then ship over to Liverpudlians.

If some Japanese kid farts an 8 bit limerick I'll be watching a cat-based remix by lunchtime tomorrow.

eddiex
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by eddiex » Sun Feb 10, 2013 7:38 pm

angstrom, dropping mad knowledge all over the place.
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Machinesworking
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by Machinesworking » Sun Feb 10, 2013 7:51 pm

I see where you're coming from with that, but even the Blues was born out of a sort of 'multiculturalism' in the sense that it drew from disparate sources, african tribal music, european folk and gospel music, plus big band etc. It wasn't born out of ignorance or isolation culturally. <--- Not saying you were implying that, just noticing that most people who idolize original music sources tend to forget it's almost always a mishmash of influences that aren't hard to recognize if you pay attention.

I think that's a major component missing now, we have such instant access to any cultural phenomena anywhere that it's harder for most people to decide what influences to have, or as if somehow acknowledging that you have influences means you must stick to the formula of the genre. Two of my favorite genres of music are entirely guilty of this, if four electronic acts or metal bands have some common thread stylistically a new sub-genre is created, IE Dubstep or Folk Metal, and new bands reference only those four original bands......
I mean to a degree this has always been the case, I just think all the choices you have now, plus all the access you have to the actual hardware and knowledge has made it more difficult for people to make cool connections between various music they like to come up with something that sounds slightly different. Basically all these people looking for a pure untainted source are IMO completely missing the picture when it comes to music, in the sense that "originality" is mostly just evolution from earlier constructs, not spontaneous life emerging whole from sand.

With that in mind though I like antique-ing plug ins for a similar reason in the sense that it references a time and place, but my purpose isn't to recreate that era for some sense of solidarity with that authenticity but because it has a cinematic effect. Speakerphone emulates all sorts of low quality recording techniques, so you can fade out a song with it sounding like it's being played on a 45 record with skips in a small room with the door closed. I wouldn't want to use it to make a whole record sound "authentic" though. That's where I tend to lose interest, and where people tend to think it's some sort of search for the "pure" source. It's not and has never been about something being completely original, but more about it drawing from a larger pool of sources than most other music in it's genre does.

beats me
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by beats me » Mon Feb 11, 2013 2:55 pm

Last year’s cultural discovery: Gangnam Style.

Time to pack it in. :x

Angstrom
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by Angstrom » Mon Feb 11, 2013 3:28 pm

Machinesworking wrote:I see where you're coming from with that, but even the Blues was born out of a sort of 'multiculturalism' in the sense that it drew from disparate sources, african tribal music, european folk and gospel music, plus big band etc. It wasn't born out of ignorance or isolation culturally. <--- Not saying you were implying that, just noticing that most people who idolize original music sources tend to forget it's almost always a mishmash of influences that aren't hard to recognize if you pay attention.
One of my favourite cultural tributaries of the blues, especially Delta Blues is ...

Around the year 1800 a lot of Mexican labourers were shipped off to Hawaii to do cheap construction. They took their slack key guitar fingerpicking and crooning style and the locals picked it up and added slide to it [source].
Around 1880 that Hawaiian style guitar and singing was a cultural smash back in the mainland US , even in the Delta Juke joints. The locals incorporated it. Leading early Blues afficinado WC Handy commented of his first exposure to it.
After a dispute with AAMC President Councill, Handy resigned his teaching position to rejoin the Mahara Minstrels and tour the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In 1903 he became the director of a black band organized by the Knights of Pythias, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Handy and his family lived there for six years. In 1903 while waiting for a train in Tutwiler in the Mississippi Delta, Handy had the following experience:

"A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars....The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."[4][5]

Tl;dr the Mexican to Hawaiian influence on Proto-blues.

Machinesworking
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by Machinesworking » Mon Feb 11, 2013 6:58 pm

^^^ That's dammed cool, didn't know that.
It is almost funny how this all works. Obviously the Blues wasn't born out of ignorance or some isolated cultural pocket in the south where some soulful illiterate black guy got "real", but seemingly that's how the crowd of people aping their sound would have it read? If the way I portray it is actually accurate, and I believe it is, then I'm not at all surprised that all these "musicians" can do is copy and run around searching for the exact mic set up the Beattles used on Abby Road in order to emulate their heros....

I'm tempted to go off about the supreme ignorance of the middle and upper classes in terms of having this desire to portray any achievements of poor or racially and ethnically different people than them as not as culturally aware, or admirable for their primitiveness, but I think the underlying themes of this discussion of cultural thievery while adding nothing to the music, and ignorant assumptions about people pretty much say that without me having to point it out. I will say this though, the blanket rejection of the contribution of poverty stricken white gospel and folk music as the seed for a chunk of the blues is a great example of the rejection of anything in the picture that taints the "noble savage" myth people need to create.

H20nly
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Re: Dave grohl sound city studio movie

Post by H20nly » Mon Feb 11, 2013 9:52 pm

interesting thread this has become.

i would tend to agree with what i've read here. the notion of trying to sound "authentic" while drawing only from what's "been done" previously is a lot like having a root note in a song. while you need that root to ground you and to be clearly recognized... it's not the root note that makes the song unique, only what makes it cohesive. i think it's okay to be 2/3 or 3/4... or even 7/8 borrowed from something past in your sound as long as the remaining piece is completely new and completely memorable. that, IMO, is what makes someone/some group have a NEW sound that has elements of deeper roots while still providing something deeply original. special sauce, if you will...

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