Radiowar

before i started playing project m a few months ago i probably hadnt touched brawl since like the first month i bought it. i think it's pretty amazing that ive gotten so much more value out of a community-made mod than the original game. gettin pumped for the update. the new characters look amazing

technically speaking there are a number of "errors" here that may be causing the issues you're hearing. some general thoughts, without (hopefully) being too pedantic: an overabundance of 4ths and 7ths - not necessarily a problem, as the source is very 4ths heavy (though it seems to me this arrangement is lacking a solid foundation in the bass), though you want to be careful about leaping to dissonances, especially when leaping from dissonances. tenor part at m.1-2, for example, is a little mean (almost entirely made up of leaps). choral writing differs from orchestral writing in this sense. (also the alto figures in m. 2 and m. 4) m. 1 harmony is unclear. very broadly, it seems to suggest something like ii7 - V , though this is confused by the bass motion and the 4ths-and-7ths-ness of the soprano, alto, and tenor. m. 2 harmony is very unclear as well. as far as i can tell, you have viiø7 - vi7 - V - I (with the B suspended in the bass?) | (VII . . .) the modulation to VII is at the very least unprepared. at beats 2-3 you have both the bass and tenor leaping against a rising soprano line (to a tripled B, no less), and given the uncertainty of the underlying harmony it can be difficult to grasp. voice crossing alto and tenor in m. 3 may be unintentionally obscuring the alto. perhaps the tenor could rest and have the B on beat 2? rhythmically speaking this is quite rigid and square (beats 3-4 of m. 1 in particular, where every voice is on 8th notes). a more sustained bass, and a tenor and alto with fewer leaps (and perhaps some rests) might add some rhythmic tension, textural clarity, and prevent you from articulating harmonies you do not intend. to generalize, i think most of the issues come from the fact that you're dealing with a lot of parallel 4th movement, which is difficult to deal with in SATB writing. the difficulty is going to be to treat them in a way where 1) the harmony is clear as possible, 2) there arent any unnecessary dissonances created by awkward leaps, and 3) ensuring a solid foundation in your bass/tenor(+baritone??), which is tricky given the limited number of voices available to you.

lol i saw ppl retweeting why cant i fold it this morning and thought it was just some kind of dumb parody joke well

i loooooove alicia's keys if only i'd had it when i made that shenmue track

and again, appreciation of encoding, instruments, "cool plugins", etc. is not the same as the experience of a work of music as a unified entity. it is removed, at a distance, abstracted from the music itself. the spirit of the analogy remains the same whatever your nitpicks with my phrasing.

i dont see the difference. the point still stands, that in either case you are appreciating the thing in question at arm's length. not for the experience of the thing itself, but in qualities abstracted from it.

thats simply not true. the reason why i say its a 20th century narrative is because it is unique to 20th century, post-industrial era thinking. the fetishization of progress, musically speaking, found its purest expression in 20th century post-romantic atonality, people like schoenberg and babbitt. you are assuming there is something eternal, has-always-been about our relationship with technology and progress. i said as much in the last paragraph of my previous post. where i disagree is this idea of "improvement". it makes me think of those michael moore documentaries, where whenever he wanted to portray an idea as stupid or worthless (ie. "outdated") he would use some black-and-white instructional video from the 50's, which allows us as an audience to feel intellectually superior over hundreds of years of gullible, iphone 5-less rubes. the 2005 version of king kong is not superior to the 1933 original by virtue of its cg. the future is not simply the present with shinier stuff. technological progress ≠ objectively better art. i went on, in my previous post, to say how fetishization of technological progress has allowed, among other things, the appropriation and homogenization of culture, resulting in music which is objectively bad, ie. untrue. i dont know what you mean by "what about instrumental music" when nothing in my post was specific to instrumental or vocal music. maybe you think i am talking about a piece of music where somebody recites scientific truths over top, which...well, im not. instrumentation and production values are more abstract from music than "truth" because to experience a piece for its instrumentation or its production values is to hear it at arm's length, not for the music itself. it would be like writing a book report by saying you didnt like the story, but appreciated that the pages were bound with glue and the words written in ink. this is perhaps the greatest flaw in your thinking. "theory" does not inform the composition of music, but the listening of it. theory is after-the-fact, at its best it is an act of empathy. you say that you are not "formally trained" in music theory (though you seem perfectly comfortable making broad statements about classical composition), but if you were to study, say, baroque counterpoint, you would find a theory of music that is actually quite alien from the composer's conception of their own work. take fugal form, for example, which (to put it simply) in modern academic terms is a process by which a theme is composed-out over the course of a piece. typically a fugue can be divided into three sections: 'exposition', 'development', and 'recapitulation' (incidentally, terms borrowed from classical sonata theory). this is quite different from the way bach conceived of his fugues, which all evidence suggests was as a kind of musical rhetoric informed by classical oration in ancient greece (exordium, narratio, etc.). as rigorous as our modern theories of counterpoint and harmony are, its a common joke when studying the stuff that the rules apply to everybody except for bach. mozart and beethoven are, for that matter, noteworthy for the ways in which they transcended and contradicted the "rules" of their time, not adhered to them. of course, theory can, to a certain extent, help with communication of musical ideas through writing or speech, but to me thats about the same as how you need to understand what numbers and operators are to be a mathematician. once you start talking about the "rules" of theory informing composition, though, youve gone off course.

whoaa what you are making the mistake of applying 20th century narratives of upward-linear technological progress to changes in musical style and aesthetic. monteverdi isnt worse for lack of pro tools. palestrina wasnt longing for the harmonic possibilities of integral serialism. look any discussion of music that hinges on whether or not it is "good" or "bad" is gonna come up with the answer "well i dont like x so music is subjective." i tend to think of it like this: if i throw someone a baseball and they catch it, then throw them a football and they drop it, for them to respond "football is a bad sport" would be complete nonsense. it's not the question at hand. to my mind the only quantity to music that has any bearing on its value is truth. a piece of music is only good or bad to the extent that it resonates as true to the listener, in the way that it remains true to itself, and reflects something about the world that they live in truthfully. when people say something like "i dont like rap or country" (a statement which im almost certain is of a particular demographic) it isnt because of some abstract question of instrumentation or production values or whatever, it's because those styles tend to be regional and informed by specific experience which they are outside of, therefore it doesnt resonate as truthful, and they are unable or unwilling to empathize. however, to take my earlier point one step further, one of the side effects of the technological progress you're talking about has actually been an increased falseness in music. on the one hand, technology has allowed creators and audiences to share experiences in a way they have never been able to before; on the other hand, when barriers begin to break down, this idea can veer into a kind of all-things-being-equal way of thinking, where the engine of mainstream popular culture has the contradictory aims of recognizing the validity in all forms of human expression, while subsuming those forms into itself so that they can repackage and sell them. often times the way it is able to do this is by saying it has improved upon urban or rural culture through "objective" measures of so-called technological progress and virtuosity. this frequently results in a kind of cultural colonialism, whether we're talking about the ways edm culture warped dubstep (an expression of uk street culture) into something that perversely celebrates its lack of humanity, or lady gaga's appropriation of the burqa.

my buddy showed me this track today...its from 2004 apparently, suuuuper raw old school if anyone was ever wondering where the "dub" in dubstep comes in

i didnt say anything about orchestra or hans zimmer. when i say "music for film" i mean any music written to accompany film (im thinking general cinema, art film, and television, as opposed to music videos which you might instead say are film created to accompany music, and advertisements which i'd consider a separate thing entirely). the point im making there is that music for film can be - in terms of harmony and instrumentation or, more broadly, timbre - just about anything. but those make up only part of what constitutes a style, you need to consider form as well. you cant meaningfully talk about a style of music without consideration of its context, by which i mean the environment in which it exists, or is intended to exist. the formal and melodic content of film music is determined by considerations of imagery (the picture on-screen) and theme (the acting or emotional content). in the same way, the content (formal, etc.) of video game music is determined by things which are specific to video games: like film, imagery and theme (though this part i'd say is different from film in the sense that the on-screen action in video games is indeterminate in some way or another, not least that it is potentially infinite, so it has to go about it in a way different from film) and hardware (for a long time this was something very rigid - like limited number of voices which determined texture, timbre, length of the music, and so on - which made vgm a little easier to pin down, but as i said earlier i think hardware is still very much a factor today). to put it another way...generally speaking, one might describe edm as a style purely in terms of superficial harmonic/melodic and timbral qualities ("usually x-y bpm, repetitive four-on-the-floor rhythms, synthetic timbres, etc."), but without considering form or context, it doesnt make for a particularly useful music theory. in order to grasp those essential components of style you need to consider that these things were not necessarily conscious aesthetic considerations, or taken for granted as The Way Things Are Done, and acknowledge how they were shaped by the instruments/hardware used and the conditions in which they were created in the first place. this includes the use of short repeating loops, which were a byproduct of the typical two-turntables-and-a-mixer setup, and drum machines and samplers with limited memory; timbral qualities which were determined by the kinds of effects available on mixers; tempo and form which were derived in part from the kinds of records being used, as well as the fact that the styles were born out of parties and raves which were intended to have continuous music for hours at a time, and so on. to use your earlier example of "glam rock", even if they were in terms of instrumentation and harmony indistinguishable from other forms of rock music (which they werent, in the ways that you described), but taken as a whole which includes stage performance, recording practice, lyrical content, and a specific function or ethos (the "gender-bending" you mentioned), they become distinguishable as a subgenre at the very least ("rock" is still in the name). i cant speak to the mortal kombat example, but i dont think anything ive said precludes pop music which can work as film music which can work as video game music. take video games live, for example, where part of the novelty of it is experiencing video game music outside of its intended context, which in my mind does not negate it as its own specific entity. neither does the use of a pop song in a tv show negate its identity as a pop song.

context. vgm is a style in the same sense that music for film is a style, which is that it has more to do with formal/contextual characteristics (ie. the idea of music which is meant to loop infinitely, or reflect/comment on indeterminate action on-screen) than specific ideas of instrumentation or "genre". 8 bit era vgm is not so much a style as defined by its timbral characteristics but by its form determined by limitations of hardware and its intended function. in that sense it is no different stylistically from current gen vgm.

dubstep is extremely difficult to talk about in any reasonable sense because it has gotten to the point that "dubstep" simply means "crazy wacky bass synths". im sure a lot of people are gonna roll their eyes at me here, but i dont think there can be any meaningful discussion on this topic without a full understanding of what it is we're talking about. i understand that styles grow and evolve, and part of that process is the change of hands, but i find it hard to reconcile what is a subtle, conscious, expressive form of dance music - whether we're talking about what you might call , or the more or experimental - with the kind of nihilistic/hedonistic edm-festival culture stuff which is really more of an amalgamation of dubstep, electro house (a la justice/mstrkrft), dnb, and screamo/post-hardcore rock (and more recently, southern hip-hop/trap). in short, naked, shallow cultural appropriation. you might as well talk about whether or not rap has the right to exist based on your opinion of papa roach.of course, none of this really matters to anyone for whom the question about liking/disliking dubstep comes to down to a kind of my-guys-against-your-guys argument that defaults to a kind of noncommittal Live And Let Live, so im just trapped alone in a void without a mouth to scream (also just for the record, im not trying to say that the synthesis techniques associated with the kind of "dubstep" im complaining about are inherently invalid. there are plenty of artists on ocr alone that can speak to that. dubstep has always had an element of aggression to it. the music im criticizing is of a kind that is, unmoored from social context, aggression for aggression's sake).

All I have to add to that is also to be creative. hmm, a bit controverisal but i like it

the question "what are the best ways to be creative in a daw" is a lot like the question "what is the best way to get from toronto to california". practical (ie. non "philosophical") advice might be something like "take such and such highway", which doesnt address the more realistic concerns of where you'll end up sleeping, or what you're going to do when your car unexpectedly breaks down, etc. (i am totally stealing this analogy from somewhere, but i cant remember where) the point is so-called practical advice only takes you so far, while the majority of the creative process is going to be defined by how you as an individual navigate through it. i think of video tutorials in much the same way. if i watch a video about, for example, how to produce a certain synth tone, what ends up happening for me is i may or may not end up with the result intended by the tutorial, but more importantly i will have been exposed to a new method or perspective, and that is far more valuable than a point-a-to-b approach to "how do i get good creativity". obviously this is just something that works for me. maybe for someone else they absorb video tutorials and forum posts and find that they have an infinite tool box to perfectly recreate the music they hear in their head. ive never been any good at that. for me, composition is the question "what happens when i hit this thing with that thing" and music is whatever comes after.

ehhh imo you should never really "do genre". in my experience thinking about genre leads to thinking about other people's music which leads to frustration, self-loathing, but most of all a pattern- or characteristic-based approach to writing. you want to avoid repetition? be creative. you want to be creative? don't think, do.

if the problem is you find that you are writing music that lacks "variation" i dont see how listening to music is any help. the comparison op draws between their typical writing process and "improvisation" says to me that the music sounds/feels repetitive because the process has become repetitive. if that's the case, switch up your process. you can apply an improvisatory ethic to composition in the sense that you dont chase sounds, but ideas. dont let yourself accumulate patterns or habits, instead approach a new piece with a question, like "what would happen if i did this."

fair enough. i thought the scratching sounded a little stock-sample-y to me - not that its a bad way to go about it, stitching together samples like that. but yeah generally speaking you wanna filter quite the hell out of that kinda stuff. even if its just something like the , you only really need the very high end of the sound for it to register.i guess you could try to look around youtube for some cool scratch routines/tutorials to grab some rhythms from? on my first few listens the cymbals came across to me as oddly washy and low-pitched, and that they were eating up the trumpet register. i mean, as a whole this track makes really great use of "fakey" sounds, but that was the one point where i felt like i got taken out of it. im not sure that the solution is necessarily filtering the trumpets or the cymbals, but the cymbals do sound particularly raw there, if that makes any sense. it's a super small nitpick in any case

yeah i gotta disagree with timaeus, this is all very tight. the trading fours between organ and ensemble is pretty unambiguous to me. there are a couple potential issues that stand out to me though. im not sure how youre doing the scratching (im thinkin roughly 1:00-1:15), but youre essentially using it as part of the auxiliary percussion here (as opposed to something soloistic), so the repetitive technique begins to stick out. it seems like there is little to no fader involved, and the rhythms themselves are fairly repetitive. i would also suggest a hp filter on that stuff, as youve got a pretty dense texture goin on and at a certain point scratching is essentially rhythmic white noise. one other little detail thing , at ~2:36 the cymbals and trumpet seem to clash. i would go with some brighter cymbals there ? (sounds like youre using a china) or maybe just a little filter.

it's real this is an incredibly sensitive performance, especially considering that all the parts were recorded individually (?) im definitely feeling maridia here, not just the literal theme, but that it somehow manages to be both hauntingly alien yet inviting though i do think its odd that the percussion is limited exclusively to cymbals, especially given the limited resonant characteristics of the samples, where toms or even a little brushed snare might have given some support to what is otherwise a largely pointillistic texture.

you have to feel it. introducing variety for its own sake, whether an every-four-bars thing, or some large scale hyper-rhythm, isnt going to make your music feel anymore alive if the "variations" themselves become mechanical. its all about context. part of the reason why the circularity of billie jean works is because every instrument and voice is essentially rhythm section. on the other hand if youre gonna try to sequence jazz or something, you've gotta think about the ways that the kit is really a piano. these days i try to do as little work in the sequencer as possible, performing whatever i can, both acoustic and midi.

i leave my snes back at my parents' place, and use it every few months when i visit. probably the last time i played it and it worked would have been a few months ago back in april/may, but it could have been as far back as january. when i went back a couple weeks ago, the system powered on but nothing showed up on screen (back home i run it through a vga box and play it on an lcd monitor). i decided to bring it back with me to try it out on a tv, using my gamecube av cable. system powers on, only now there are these white lines scrolling up the screen: i tried to hook it up using the rf cable and got nothing, though its likely i was doing it entirely wrong (that thing always bewildered me when i was younger). i googled around about this but havent been able to find consistent information on this problem. some people mention similar problems with different colour lines or buzzing noises, which im not having. the closest ive found suggests that it's a problem with the power supply, but i didnt feel it was conclusive enough that i'd wanna spend the money on another power supply on the off-chance that my system is just completely dead/dying. anybody have any idea whats going on ?

hmm but i think "vaporwave" is a lot like the present-day version of the thomas bangalter example i posted earlier, which is to say it would not be fair to impose mainstream pop music standards of "creativity" or "talent" or "ownership". i recently got pretty into spring breakers, a film which makes use of extremely abstracted images and sounds from things which might otherwise be thought of as depraved or soulless. i think if you listen to someone like INTERNET CLUB and look at their angelfire page, theres a similar thing at work, a kind of "trash art". im not sure who came up with the name vaporwave, but there are similar implications in the name, the idea of taking musical and visual source material from things which were either intended as superfluous or background, or were thought of as technologically primitive or shallow. which is to say all these electronic music styles, vaporwave, house, techno, hip-hop, etc., they all operate with their own language, that sampling in footwork is different from sampling in trip-hop, and contrary to the perception of all sampling is like i'll just take 2 bars of an mp3 and copy and paste it over and over, theres actually a depth of technique there.

i dont think we can just take for granted that sample-based music inherently lacks creativity. the whole premise is that musical recordings (ie. commodified music) can yield interesting musical results when they are treated simply as sound objects. sounds are not ideas, but the results of ideas. to understand post-homework daft punk you gotta put it in a context where thomas bangalter was putting out shit like . does it really make any difference to the experience of the music whether or not we know where the sounds come from? you might as well tell miles davis to credit the guy who sold him his trumpet. obviously there exist examples of "lazy" or "uncreative" sampling, but i dont think its fair to say that laziness is endemic to sampling (the comes to mind). there hasnt been an increase in hacks or imitators because of sampling, any more than there were because of the twelve bar blues.edit: FURTHERMORE i would argue that crediting is not only unnecessary to justify sampling, but there have been cases where the act of giving credit was used to cover up or excuse honest to god theft. a recent example that comes to mind is by zomby. it was the lead single from dedication, and it was probably the most popular track on the album - and then it came out that the track was based on by a producer called reark. the story (as i understood it) was that reark had contacted zomby with his track, and the two agreed to collaborate. then zomby puts the track out as his own, reark raises a fuss and gets an official credit. the point being that giving credit does not actually have any bearing on a piece of music's artistic merit, particular in cases like this where there was an actual deception (of both the audience and the original artist) taking place.

tripping is just scratching the surface. i mean, its definitely a metaphor for the philosophy of brawl, which was restricting movement, the game literally punishing the player for playing as much as people hate on things like directional airdodging/wavedashing (among other techniques in melee), they were part of a larger set of movement options and quirks which made melee unique. brawl went so decisively in another direction, i dont see the things that made competitive melee possible coming back. i think if smash 4 does end up having a competitive scene it would likely be a very different game from brawl and melee, which i dont think is a bad thing.

melee allowed a degree of control and expressiveness with characters that is, in my experience, unmatched. it also built on the customizability of 64, allowing for greater "world building". brawl had a much greater depth of features, but severely nerfed the depth of the playing experience. it was a fun game, but rarely anything more than that. the ssbm evo stream broke records today tho, something like 134k viewers. clearly there is still love for the game. i dont expect the developers to "cater" to the competitive crowd, but i hope smash 4 is the best game it can possibly be, something inclusive and open to all types of play.