MOF wrote:Really? I think if you hadn’t heard the original you would be thoroughly underwhelmed,The "strong" music is so powerful that sticks out no matter what. You can play Smoke On The Water on a banjo or on bagpipes or toys, and it will still be itself and just as powerful and crowd-moving.
Really. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVo6s6W7EHE
I've put this loud at parties and the house has come down just fine.
even if you had, I can’t imagine it stirring your emotions.
Well, I won't speak about yours emotions, but the 8 bit version stirs mine alright, exactly now. It's telling me to pick up the guitar and play along!
It’s all about arrangements. Just imagine the opening full orchestral stabs of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony played on banjos!!
Well, I feel it would be a serious failure of imagination not to think about it... admittedly, you would need a lot of banjos. :D
Listen to Badfinger’s version of Without You, then Nilsson’s. It’s the timbre (read ‘lead synth sound’) and emotion (read ‘performance controls of that lead synth’) of his voice and the arrangement of orchestral parts (read ‘more supporting synth sounds’) that put it into a different class.
This I've never heard - dunno what you're talking about. I'll look for an 8 bit version :D
I used to think that a good A&R man (it was men in those days) should be able to spot a million seller from the rough demo’, but if you had to sift through countless cassettes a day I think you’d struggle to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Well, doing something for 8 hours at a time, with such a big element of randomness involved, is a terrible fate no matter what it is that you're doing.
But that aside, the hard reality is - in my opinion - that it is true.
The music I'm talking about it's exactly the one that doesn't need anything big to sound like itself.
"Strong" music can be played to great effect with one instrument, and a voice if voices are involved. If you have more, sure, you can decorate it and make it bigger, badder, better... but take an nylon string guitar and invent a solid riff.... there you are. Actually, that's pretty much how "Smoke" came about if I am not mistaken - jamming and riffing at a rehearsal session.
If had to find a reason, I think it's a hard thing to accept because it involves admitting that most of the music we invent, and even a lot of what we like is, sadly, not of that sort. Most of the universe is, after all, a lot of fluff. I speak, of course, barely of myself.
As of A&R, their job is (used to be) not so much find these gems, but to find something for that can be packaged and commercialized and sold even if it's not that great. Because money is made on predictable volumes, and "strong" music is rare :D
Pop corn is a lovely little melody. If it had came about before synthetizers, it would have been played in some other form. It just so happened that there were synthetizers around when it got out.
If our potential audiences had such qualities then we could all just release the demo i.e. a lead vocal and maybe one instrument, but it would rarely work in my opinion. It’s only when you’ve tried numerous combinations of sounds, chord inversions, tempos etc that it sounds as if it was always meant to be that way.
Not sure what you mean. Until you've written a piece like that, it's not it. We (well, I) are talking finished composition, not what happens during the writing.. for that there's the gazillion Facebook songs with people making a video of them with a guitar and three chords and say "I've an idea, what do you think?" (well, what do you think that I think? :D).
