My question post ended up being more popular than I ever expected... and while I wanted to keep this reasonable in length, I also didn't want to "punish" participants by leaving anyone out.
So, in a clear-cut case of suicide by word-length, I went ahead and answered one question by each "asker." (If you don't want to read the whole thing, and I can't blame you, you can see just the questions-- and direct cuts to each of the answers-- by
accessing my journal from its main feed. There's no need to feel guilty about "skimming" by reading just a couple answers.)
Thanks very much to everyone who asked me a question-- there are some seriously fun Qs here!
n3m3sis42 asks:
Tell us what you REALLY think about auto-tuning.
For those who have been living under a rock, Autotune (or Auto-Tune) is a computer-based method of correcting badly-intonated vocal pitches on the fly. Originally designed for an occasional quick pitch fix or two in expensive, we-charge-by-the-hour studio situations, it has also been abused from the time of
Cher's "Believe" forward as a unique "robotic" vocal effect. Its most extreme settings generate incredibly abrupt, humanly-impossible pitch inflections that once sounded "futuristic". This is the Autotune most of us can readily recognize, what we think of when the effect's name is invoked.
So uhhh what do I think about it? As an "extreme vocal effect" a la Cher or
T-Pain, Autotune has well outworn its welcome. I am surprised it hasn't already become totally passe. Every time some new
goofy Youtube video or
Android app indicates that it's reached total-joke status among the listening public, some new single comes out that purposely overuses the effect in the same way we've been hearing for a full 14+ years now.
(Then again, studios totally overused and abused reverb effects in the 1950s and early 1960s... yet reverb is still a de facto staple of pop recordings today.)
In its more subtle, originally-intended usage, you could argue that Autotune is much more sinister, enabling "talentless" vocalists to appear competent on record (or even live, since it can be used on stage too). And I reckon that's exactly why
n3m3sis42 is asking me about this.
But if Autotune were to disappear tomorrow-- which it won't-- there are still plenty of "cheats" available to modern musicians. In today's recording software, you can manually correct the pitch (and rhythm) of a vocalist one note at a time, with or without Autotune. Or you can have them do 80 takes of the same song and piece it together word by word, choosing the best take of the 80 for each individual syllable, and you'd "never know" from the end result that you're actually listening to a collage of 80 separate performances. Time-consuming, yes... but not nearly as time-consuming as you might assume, thanks to the computer.
To broaden the question well beyond Autotune, I would argue that these hyper-perfectionist digitally-based practices have huge costs in terms of recorded energy-- sometimes. And I can't fully support that answer, because how do you quantify "musical energy"?
I can only say that the recorded music of the 60s / 70s / 80s often seems to me to have a lot more life, mistakes and all-- whatever "life" means-- than the recorded music of the post-digital-workstation mid-90s and beyond. The new stuff sounds bigger, fatter, louder... and frequently, a great deal less exciting. It's not because it's digitally recorded; it's because whatever live performance is there has been edited and manipulated to error-free death, using techniques that would take years with analog tape but take just minutes with a computer.
"Autotune Extreme" will probably eventually become passe in the next couple of years, and I cannot imagine it will sound anything less than horribly dated by its official 20th anniversary in 2018. ...Then, of course, it will become cool as a "retro thing" by 2020.
"Autotune Subtle", as heard every week on Glee and probably on just about every other pop hit that's come out in the last ten years, is not going away, any more than digital editing is going away. So it doesn't really matter what I think of it.
But I don't think its use necessarily indicates that the artist behind the mic has no talent. I think it indicates that producers / handlers in commercially-oriented genres have an unnatural obsession with quite-literally inhuman perfection right now.
The best vocalist in the world has a bunk note now and again-- heck, by computer-measured standards of precision, the "best" (or at least, best-intonated) vocalist in the world produces a "bunk" note every 10-15 seconds, minimum. SO LET'S DIGI-IRON THE HUMAN OUT OF EVERYONE... BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT.
The next step is... CGI vocalists. Don't laugh-- plenty of DSP think tanks have already been working on this for years, it goes along perfectly with speech synthesis (imagine your GPS singing you the most beautiful song in the world as it tells you to turn left at the ramp).
I reckon we have 10 years tops before the first fully computer-generated vocal performance to become a major charting hit arrives (complete with CGI face and body for the video)... and 15-20 years until a computer successfully writes a hit song for that computer-generated vocalist.
I am fascinated by DSP and algorithmic composition, but I sincerely hope we as a culture will take these eventual opportunities to burn down our local Clear Channel affiliates, and then promptly arm ourselves to the gills against the imminent android invasion.
edit: The entire Internet is abuzz this weekend about
this "awe-inspiring" video, with a common comment being "We have Autotune for that now... why didn't she use it?" I'm not at all convinced that Autotune *wasn't* used for this... and Autotune would not fix this vocalist's most obvious problems / deficiencies. It isn't a miracle maker. The person on the mic has to have SOME musical sensibility / tone going in.
malruniel11 asks:
Have you ever wanted to kill a metronome? Conversely, have you ever wanted to kill someone *with* a metronome?
My own internal clock, while not nearly as accurate as the beloved Casio on my wrist, is accurate enough for performance purposes these days that I rarely find use for a metronome, outside of figuring out the precise tempo of a given recording. (And I can usually accurately guess that much within 4-6bpm, even without one.)
The only time I have ever truly hated a metronome is when I have practiced scales against one, something which I have conspicuously avoided (with or without metronome) in my 25+ years of playing various instruments. Scales are for suckers, and those who want to impress their instrumental teachers. (I became a composer / theorist for a reason. We just tell other people what they're supposed to play.)
The wooden, coffin-shaped metronomes of yore would not be considered a suitable murder weapon by anyone, except perhaps
the TSA.
The tiny little electronic metronomes of the last 15-20 years would definitely be inadequate to kill someone, even if swallowed.
...Well, if you could coerce someone in poor cardiovascular health (myself included, probably) to do jumping jacks in sync to such a device at 180-240bpm for roughly 30-60 minutes, I suppose maybe then you could do them in. But you'd still need a gun or something to force them to do that, and homicidal sociopaths are just as busy as anyone else these days... why not just use the damned gun?
These days, I use either my cell phone or my computer when I need a metronome. I value these devices' ongoing functional existence more than I devalue the life of the average incredibly annoying human being.
myrna_bird asks:
I know you play guitar, but do you play other instruments too?
Most of my formal instrumental training was on piano, my first instrument, started around the age of 7 or 8. I am very grateful for that, because piano is a "gateway instrument" that enables the broadest possible understanding of harmony (my best students in theory are nearly always pianists-- for a reason!), and as such, also facilitates much faster progress on any other instrument you choose to learn thereafter.
Along with the piano itself, I'm really interested in musical electronics-- always have been, as they facilitate one-man-band sorts of things. So I've spent much of my musical lifetime fairly into MIDI and synthesizers, stuff you usually play or control from a piano-style keyboard.
I also play instruments related to the "standard" guitar-- bass, various steel guitars-- and drums / percussion. I can sing, mostly because I have to to do my job. I don't particularly like to do so, nor do I ever claim I am a vocalist. I have a cello, recently bought a violin and a clarinet. It would be my life's dream to play bass clarinet, but I need to find the right bargain on one first... I'm cheap.
jem0000000 asks:
How do you tell what sound a letter makes?
Meaning, "How do I know where to find an A, or a D-flat, or...?" This is actually a tough one. I use whatever pitch reference is handy when I'm not sure, which I'm frequently not. I'm the same as most musicians in that regard; we use electronic tuners, pitch pipes, tuning forks, a (hopefully-recently-tuned) piano, whatever we can get to verify the correct fundamental frequency we're seeking. Instrumentalists learn "where" notes are located on their instruments, so once it's verified as being in tune, it's not a concern.
Some among us have what is commonly referred to as "perfect pitch," meaning that pitch names are like colors to them; they recognize (and can produce) them on demand. There are some who think that perfect / absolute pitch is a sign of great musical ability. In reality, it's not all that helpful, nor does it say anything whatsoever about your musical ability. It mainly indicates that a musician began lessons at an early age (nearly all folks with absolute pitch began formal training around the ages of 3-5; there's something about the plasticity of the mind at that time that takes teachers' statements like "...And this is a B" extremely literally).
Many years of scholarly experiments (and failed "LEARN ABSOLUTE PITCH OR YOUR MONEY BACK!" sorts of programs) have proven that you cannot really learn absolute pitch... at least not in the sense where it is instant, as it is for those who "have it." But you can learn relative pitch-- the art of instantly knowing the name of every other note that follows from the reference pitch you've been given to begin with. (Once I know that a song is in E, or starts in E, I can usually tell you everything else you'd want to know about it by ear.)
That's a big part of my job, in fact... to teach students how to hear pitch (and harmony) in the relative sense. A solid mastery of relative pitch is much more important for being a good musician, especially if you ever want to improvise anything and/or understand how music actually freakin' works.
dblicher asks:
I once heard a concert of Italian chamber music from a brief period in which instruments were tuned in quarter-tones. When was this period? What was this type of music called? It gave me a headache and unfocused my eyes, but I found it fascinating.
Short answer: The piece in question was almost certainly from the 20th century-- and it isn't / wasn't indicative of what I would consider "common practice" in the 20th century.
Long answer: There are probably quite a few readers who have no idea what "quarter-tone" means, so an explanation is necessary, and-- oh, man. I'll try to keep this as short as humanly possible.
People talk about the "octave" as a unit of distance-- an "interval"-- in music. An octave is two notes separated by a multiple of two in their fundamental frequencies-- e.g., 440Hz (440 wave cycles per second; "A 440") vs. 880Hz (the A sounding an octave up from A 440), or 440Hz vs. 220Hz (the latter being the A sounding an octave below A 440).
Here's an MP3 of me (and an unplugged electric guitar) demonstrating the concept of an octave by singing various "A"s. Notice that the notes I'm singing / playing, while distinct in low / highness, all sound related-- because they are related, by a multiple of their fundamental frequencies.
OK, so, we have twelve distinct pitch classes that split up our Western octave (all instances of, say, "A" on the piano are members of "pitch class A"). Sit down at a piano and count the notes between a given key and the key above / below it that matches it perfectly in shape-- you'll find a total of twelve of them in between the similarly-shaped keys. (Again,
here's me singing / playing all twelve of the pitch classes between A220 and A440.)
The way other cultures divide the octave into smaller groups of pitch classes varies greatly. The music of the Middle East and India, for instance, is generally said to have 24 pitch classes per octave. In other words, they have equivalents to all twelve of our basic pitch classes, but then there are twelve extra pitch classes within their octave that a Western pianist literally cannot play; there are simply no keys for those pitch classes.
(Folks like string players and vocalists *can* produce those extra quarter-step notes-- but if they've done their musical larnin' in the West, they're still going to have a helluva hard time doing so.
Here's an MP3 of me trying, and failing. My fretted guitar is only made to easily produce half-steps, and as for my vocal abilities...)
We refer to the distance between each note of our twelve-note octave as a half step. Thusly, those additional twelve pitch classes from India that a Western pianist cannot play are known in English as quarter tones (1/2 of 1/2, natch).
Starting with the early 20th century (and, in fact, mostly relegated to the second quarter of that century), certain Western composers began seeking alternatives to our twelve-note chromatic scale.
Composers in the West who were interested in finding "notes between the normal notes" are generically known as experimenters in microtonal practice. Some of them, like the all-acoustic Harry Partch (and countless electronic composers after him), were interested in dividing the usual 12-pitch-class octave into practically infinitisemal pitch classes.
Splitting the octave into, say, 37 or 51 parts (as Partch preferred) isn't exactly trivial for Western or even non-Western musicians to pull off. Partch spent most of his life designing and building a slew of entirely new instruments to make his new octave divisions happen, and to keep his vocalists correctly intonated. (If only he'd had Autotune Partch Edition!)
Other composers, like Charles Ives, kept
their microtonal explorations simpler, only splitting the octave into twice as many parts / PCs as usual in the West. While more "natural" as something we find over and over in the music of other cultures, this is still pretty damned tough for most trained Western musicians, as I've said. There are "cheater" ways to make it happen... like retuning an entire instrument a quarter-step high or low, then abusing notation to show the player to play certain notes where they normally would-- even though what comes out will *not* be the notes actually shown on the page.
(Here, I've used a similar "cheat"-- first
telling one synthesizer to play a 12-note Western chromatic scale, then
telling a second one that has been tuned a quarter-step sharp to play the same scale in alternation with the first, thus producing a 24-note chromatic scale with all the quarter-tones intact.)
The results of such experiments still sound quite peculiar to our ears-- "out of tune," "exotic," something. We're not used to all these "notes between the notes." And for some listeners who are particularly used or attuned (...ha!) to our twelve-pitch-class, equally-tempered Western system of temperament, it can generate (as
dblicher claims) a bit of a headache.
Such microtonal explorations, while relatively common, never became a truly standard, expected part of 20th-century Western musical language, or even close to it (like so many other innovations of the 20th century in the then-totally-fractured art-music world). And such things really don't occur in any Western literature before the 20th century.
dblicher, my guess is that you ran into a piece by Giacinto Scelsi on that particular program - but I can't know for certain.
soopageek asks:
What, exactly, is modulation? Or is it something that is even exact? What I mean is, the lay person knows it when they hear it, even if they don't know what it's called. Manilow was famous for doing it. Is it merely any repeated refrain with a change in key that goes up? Is it a half step? Full step? Multiple full steps? An octave? Does it matter?
Most music can be perceived to have a single pitch which is the "center pitch," or the "home pitch." How we readily know which pitch is the "center" at any given time is the topic of the average 4-5 semesters of undergraduate theory in music programs in the States (along with your other unposted question about harmony which would take me-- actually, *has* taken multiple textbook authors-- many hundreds of pages to answer)... but, yeah, that's the basic deal.
When musicians say a piece is "in E major," the "home pitch" is E. That is the note / harmonic root which always feels like home. The technical term for this pitch is tonic pitch.
In the sense that most musicians and musical pundits use the term, modulation is the process of simply shifting the music's center from an original tonic pitch to another-- say, a piece in E major moves to a new center of B major. The direction and/or "amount" (interval between original tonic and new tonic) does not matter. If the tonic pitch class changes for a meaningful length of time, we've experienced a modulation.
And while classical modulations are often made by relatively large amounts-- say, by a perfect fifth (seven half-steps) or a major third (four half-steps)... in putting Barry Manilow together with "up... a half step?
Full step?", you indicate awareness of one of the most common methods / types of modulation in popular music of the last century. This "small upward" type of modulation happens not just in 70s easy listening, but also in a million country songs, Broadway numbers, you name it.
This was of course addressed during Diane Warren's ridiculous monologue in
my "bridge" entry a few weeks ago. It's really common to find a modulation up by a half-step or whole-step, following the bridge in a commercially-oriented pop song (or Broadway number, or big band tune, or what-have-you). This practice extends the "shelf life" of the chorus / refrain by adding musical excitement. Sometimes, as with Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" (which
suddenly modulates upward by a minor third-- three half-steps-- following a guitar solo and a little pre-chorus module), the modulation is by another amount. But in this particular genre and practice, it always seems to be "up, and by a relatively small amount".
Lots of rock musicians use modulation in different, less obvious / predictable ways. It's not uncommon to have songs that follow some kind of basic verse-chorus structure, but which shift keys / tonic centers at the beginning of each new section of the form (this is relatively common practice in rock as early as the 1960s, happens a lot in the funk workouts of the Meters and James Brown... but
Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" is a particularly good "early" / straightforward example with vocals; each formal section is seemingly in its own distinct key).
The sense of "move up a little" is not a requirement in such modulations; both "direction" and interval from the original tonic to the destination key can vary widely / arbitrarily. This practice contributes greatly to the sense of abstractness / angularity in a song that employs it, and has a very different effect on the listener than the commercially-widespread "ramp up" or (yes, it's actually called this) "truck driver" modulation.
One interesting thing about modulation in 20th century pop vs. 18th / 19th century classical idioms: Someone like Bach, Beethoven or Brahms would have considered modulation a "obligatory full circle" activity. If a piece by one of these composers modulates-- and in works any longer than, say, 45-60 seconds, it nearly always does-- it "must" eventually return to its original key before the piece is through. The only way one of these dudes would have written something that violates this rule is if they had died mid-composition.
20th century popular songwriters feel no such obligation. A piece by Mozart could modulate from A to E, but it would "have to" return to A by its end. A song by Elton John could modulate from A to Bb, and could simply stay in Bb over the fadeout. There are some theorists entrenched in the classical world that consider this a sign of pop's inherent tonal inferiority and banality. I won't even begin to get into why.
Also, there is something like modulation but much shorter-lived and less substantial, called a tonicization. This is a term that most laypeople have never encountered, and many things that laypeople (and untrained musicians) might hear as modulations are actually tonicizations. In a tonicization, the listener never loses the sense / location of the original tonic pitch class, while simultaneously being aware that the local tonic center has been temporarily shifted-- perhaps for as little as one or two chords, perhaps for as long as 20-30 seconds. The precise mechanics of tonicization vs. modulation are unfortunately well beyond the scope of this... answer.
alycewilson asks:
If you had to advise an American Idol contestant musically, what would you tell them to do to improve their vocals?
Easy: Leave American Idol. Immediately.
basric asks:
I have several friends who play professionally in Nashville's philharmonic orchestra. They have had several conductors over the years, and according to my friends every conductor except one substitute were total bastards. They terrorize and belittle their musicians. Do all conductors have this power arrogance or has Nashville's orchestra just been unlucky in who was hired?
Recently I had a short dialogue with one of my favorite home-recordist musicians over Twitter about conductors. He asked what the point of a conductor was, as he couldn't figure it out. After explaining some of the conductor's importance to him, I concluded by saying something to the effect of "...but, granted, nearly all conductors are hopelessly megalomaniac wankers."
I hate to say this, but... the only nice, down-to-earth conductors you ever meet are the ones that are still in grad school, and who are so humble only because their conducting teachers are lording it over them every day. Let them out to spread their wings, and see what happens after a couple years. (And a lot of them already have the ego when they go into a grad program. Born conductors!)
roina_arwen asks:
If you have no musical talent, and can't carry a vocal tune in a bucket, but really enjoy music and would like to learn to play an instrument, what would you recommend?
This is gonna sound funny, but... I would recommend the computer.
With a little learning (some technical, some musical), some cheap / free software (or, hell, just a copy of Garageband if you have that handy), and possibly the addition of a cheap MIDI controller keyboard, you can start piecing together semi-convincing arrangements (and start learning what sounds good vs. what does not).
In fact, you don't even need the keyboard. It's possible to input everything from drum patterns to little melodies / fragments and even harmonic passages using just the mouse.
This is all enabled by something called MIDI-- a standard protocol by which "play this note, now" and other related commands can be passed from device to device, or program to program-- and something called sequencing, which might be best thought of as a computer-controlled mega-player piano that can "play" a lot of virtual MIDI instruments for you simultaneously in layers, in musical time. You use the sequencer to tell one instrument what to play, then add the second instrument against that part, so on and so forth. Pretty soon you have an entire virtual band playing stuff that you couldn't play yourself.
A lot of the most popular electronic artists of the last 30 years are not so good at actually playing their supposed instruments. I'm thinking of folks like Depeche Mode, who famously "step-sequenced" most of the parts to their most beloved songs instead of actually playing them on an instrument, and let their virtual orchestra of electronic instruments play the results in actual musical time.
Even experienced, instrumentally-competent musicians often use "step input" or "the piano-roll grid" (i.e., step sequencing) these days, but it really is something that just about anyone can figure out with a few minutes' work. (Figuring out what sounds good is a whole other story...)
If working with electronic instruments and/or computers doesn't sound appealing to you, the ukelele has been hugely popular in recent years among non-musicians. Easy to see why-- it's cheap, relatively easy to play, has a rather small learning curve to making something that at least sounds like music (...as long as the damn thing is tuned). I don't think the guitar is that much more complicated, but... in some ways, looking at it from a total-neophyte perspective, it is a lot more complicated. (Those extra two strings make certain things a lot more difficult.)
And in general, you can't go wrong with learning some basics on the piano. The piano lets you build full harmonies yourself, and also lets you explore melody vs. harmony simultaneously. "Monophonic" (one-note-at-a-time) instruments like the clarinet cannot offer such glimpses into the bigger picture of music, and also require a lot more care and technique just to produce a good-sounding single note.
While there's a lot to sounding truly good on the piano, and it can take a lifetime to master... well, anyone can learn to walk up and effectively press a button to produce a note-- even multiple notes-- anywhere in its range in about zero seconds. That's not something you can say of very many other instruments out there, and it's one less huge ol' barrier you have to cross.
(PM me if you'd like help getting started in any of these directions. I'd be happy to help further.)
medleymisty asks:
What interests you about music? I can't play it myself, but I love listening to it and it's a very important part of my life... I was wondering how someone who is more informed about it and capable of producing it feels, like if it's like writing for me. ...[H]ow do you feel about it? What role does music play in your life?
Dude. Jeez, that's... hardcore.
I reckon it's obvious that I really enjoy writing too. But I don't usually get my jollies from fiction, unless it's fairly abstract / ambiguous / artfully bizarre fiction. I imagine this is because, if it's got to be made up / non-educational in nature, I'd prefer it to be something that gives me the same ephemeral feeling as music does. If anything interests me about music, it's what I feel when I listen to it and especially when I make it. That's as close as I can come to explaining it.
Most things in my life still revolve around music, and that's been the case from a very early age. From my Craigslist instrument bargain hunts to what goes through my head in the shower (and in my dreams), from my memorization of phone numbers through solfege syllables to my inability to hear a TV show's score without commenting on it (...usually disparagingly), music plays the central role in what I do and think about every day.
But for all this-- since I now teach music, since I have learned with all this practice to hear so much from it-- I actually can't listen to it in a lot of situations. Having music on will occupy my brain with a million "Oy, how is this all structured then?" sorts of questions, and I can't turn that off any more.
So if my focus is truly required for something, anything else, I actually have to keep my surroundings music-free. It wasn't always this way, not before I occupied the bulk of my twenties learning more and more about what to hear and how to hear it. But I'm writing in silence now. If I'm going to respond to your question without sounding drunk or high, I have to write in silence.
Hell, I was in a near-accident this morning because I got too wrapped up in the new material I was listening to on the interstate; great, now I can't even *drive* with music on.
And as I think I might've addressed briefly in an older entry, music is intensely cathartic to make, yet often totally uhhh "anti-cathartic" to share with others. A non-verbal method of communication can convey deep things about yourself that you can't put into words. And, yet, it stands even less of a chance of translating into an identical effect on others as words do.
Somebody can like what you've done musically; they may even get a vaguely similar emotional impact from it, if you're incredibly good and incredibly lucky. But a big part of what steered me out of formal composition was the constant misunderstanding of what I was trying to convey when my works were presented to others, even if they seemed to like what I was up to. I just could not get over how much it hurt to be consistently "misunderstood" like that.
And yet, I couldn't really correct them-- at the risk of sounding like a total new-agey douchebag, music comes from a place too deep for words. Good luck trying to make after-the-fact words fit well enough to make someone else "get" the music.
tl;dr. On
my Twitter account, my profile byline is "Music ruins lives." I fully stand by that statement. And I am obviously a helluva masochist.