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Different way to look at production
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Ascension
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 16:28:49
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I'm not gonna write a bunch on this because the topic itself is pretty simple, taking time to apply and understand it can take a while. Lately I've been focusing on this more and seen some good results.
This is derived from a favorite jazz pianist of mine, Thelonious Monk. His philosophy for composition was to respect the space between the notes (so, not the notes themselves). Combining this with the knowledge of some basic music theory (scales and chords in particular) we see that moods or motifs in music are created by the relation of the notes played to each other (like how a chord is a chord because of the spacing of the notes along the scale- same concept for playing a harmonic fifth on a scale- the important aspect is the relation to the root note). We then realize that a piece of music is simply a relation of notes. Therefor the most important aspect of music is the relation between notes aka the space (sometimes the silence).
Just something to think about when producing. There's more to making music than just creating sounds and placing them here and there. Creating a (meaningful) relationship between sounds adds a key element as well. Feel free to make any critiques or comments.  http://soundcloud.com/ascensionsound
www.chilluminati.org - Midwest based psytrance group |
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fractal fields
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 17:04
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true, sound is nothing without silence, as matter is without the 'empty' space surrounding....
... funk the void 
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Medea
Aedem/Medea
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 17:07
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Ascension
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 17:34
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Quote:
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On 2010-07-29 17:07, Medea wrote:
Well, it's a kind of evident, isn't it?
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Maybe I was partially inspired to post this after all these "how do I make this sound" threads  . In addition, this is more of something to think about while producing rather than to conform a style around. Most people only think about the sounds, not the spaces. They spend time filling the space with sounds rather than realizing their overall influence on the track.
I don't hear this type of production style in much psy, everything seems to be getting more and more cluttered (more computing power = easier to add more sounds and layers). Even though this is easy to derive from basic music theory, there are plenty of producers out there who have 0 knowledge of theory. http://soundcloud.com/ascensionsound
www.chilluminati.org - Midwest based psytrance group |
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wizanda
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 18:01
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John Cage wrote the 4'33" Silence in the I-Ching, which was played at Woodstock. The I-Ching was a method of spacing, with the audience fulfilling the spaces. We can use the pauses of the I-Ching to express emotion in percussion. 
Keeping the spacing the same is the method of rolling, one rhythm into the next as shaman percussionists do or in quality Goa trance.
It's quite an amazing concept, when you've got more then one shaman in a party on the beach, as its possible to communicate in the middle of hundreds of drummers, by mistiming that spacing to drop in phrases. 
Also had an NDE and heaven communicated the same, with all universal knowledge being accessible by understanding of the phraseology. 
Cause an Effect = Pause an Effect 
www.wizanda.com www.soundcloud.com/wizanda |
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Ascension
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 18:06
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mk47
Inactive User
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 18:06
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yeah , i regret quitting piano lessons when i was a kid , i have zero knowledge here , thats why i always end up making random sounding rubbish , my question .. how easy is it to learn music theory , chords and sales with noone to teach you , i mean only googling things etc .. what little i know of computer music production was relatively easy from browsing forums , wiki etc , but this chords and scale business i cant seem to grasp , i can play a bit of guitar by ear though , but i dont know the notes etc .. anyway , whats a good online resource for learning .. music theory for dummies type thing
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Ascension
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 18:17
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Music theory is a "theory", so reading stuff will probably be the best way to learn it (conceptually anyway, different if you want to play an instrument). I just read through most of the Raven's Spiral Guide:
http://www.worldofbryan.com/rsg2mt.pdf
None of what I'm talking about in this post requires a deep understanding of music theory, just some basic concepts- so you don't need to read into it a ton to understand this. Anyone can go as deep as they want into theory, all of it will just end up helping you out imo. http://soundcloud.com/ascensionsound
www.chilluminati.org - Midwest based psytrance group |
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Maine Coon
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 19:56
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Cosmosis in one of his videos touched on that. Well, it was actually Laughing Buddha, his guest. His prescription was to finish your track and then start mercilessly removing things you can live without. |
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Ascension
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Posted : Jul 29, 2010 23:01
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^ Well the point of producing this way is to create meaningful relationships between your sounds as you go rather than having to go back and correct things (that might be caused by not doing the former). Obviously most everyone goes back and changes things in their track at some point, but if you're producing around the spaces in the first place, moving things around afterwards wouldn't make much sense in the whole scheme of the track. http://soundcloud.com/ascensionsound
www.chilluminati.org - Midwest based psytrance group |
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Maine Coon
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Jul 30, 2010 18:24
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^
It seems to me that this (what you are talking about) is the way people have been composing music for centuries: note-by-note, in a linear fashion and with a pretty good understanding of how notes relate to each other on the scale and how instruments relate to each other in an orchestra. The orchestra was a pretty stable unit, so if you wrote a symphony you knew what instruments were at your disposal. You could hire 6 trombone players instead of 2 – that’s about how much freedom you had in what was playing (and even that did not happen until the 19th century). The sounds those instruments made were pretty standard too, so you didn’t have to worry about HP sweeps and bitcrushers with delays or time-stretch modes. And every composer knew what sounds fit together in a chord or what rhythms don’t clash with each other, or what “jumps” in a melody sound awkward. All you had to do was assign right notes to right instruments to be played at the right time. Just like you described.
(BTW, nobody was concerned with phase effects and EQing – and somehow it all worked. Mystery...)
Fast forward to the 21st century. The number of instruments is unlimited. And people learn about mixing and mastering before they learn what a seventh cord is. In fact, a fare share of people gets their work published before opening a music theory book.
It’s not that the way you describe is enlightened and progressive – it’s almost as old as music itself. It’s that the way prevalent in today’s electronic music is backwards (and arguably barbaric).
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Ascension
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jul 30, 2010 18:47
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I think my last post wasn't that clear and deviated from the original post. The idea of "using space" is different than "creating relations between sounds". You create relations between sounds not by just the sounds themselves, but the spaces between the sounds.
So you basically compose music by making a bunch of sounds and using the space between them to create a motif rather than using the sounds themselves. You're not creating a direct relation between the sounds, you're focusing on creating a space between the sounds which creates a relation between the sounds. It's basically a way to compose by focusing on space/silence.
When I mentioned chords before I meant that it was part of this composing style because it deals with notes spaced out in a certain way. You can take that concept and take notes spaced along a scale and create spaces between them to do something like emphasize harmony or dissonance.
Ex: Long space if you are moving the whole track in a dissonant manner into a new feeling or shorter spaces between harmonic sounds or notes going up a scale, etc. There's an infinite number of possibilities, but the main focus is the space between sounds and using them to your advantage. http://soundcloud.com/ascensionsound
www.chilluminati.org - Midwest based psytrance group |
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wizanda
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Jul 30, 2010 19:00
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Which is why my post on John Cage's Silence, as when we had to analyze "what is music" at collage, not even the teacher expected what found about that track. 
The art of magic isn't based on what is, yet what isn't seen. 
Have you noticed how phrase spacing in different languages, seem to have similar timing? 
www.wizanda.com www.soundcloud.com/wizanda |
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Ascension
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Posted : Jul 30, 2010 19:49
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