About Music

How does one go about creating music?

What I fucking hate

Things that should be outlawed

• Pitch bending without aiming for a note on the scale.
• Pitch bending without aiming for any note.
• Using the modulation/vibrato control. If you use that abomination, the mod wheel, you should have a really good reason. Playing a physically-modelled acoustic patch qualifies in my book. But if you're playing an electronic-sounding lead sound, and you reach for that masturbatory joystick, you may ask yourself. (Please! ) How do I lock these pitch changes to the tempo? How do I lock them to a harmony on another track? The answer is: You don't. The LFO determines the phase, of course. You may ask yourself: What pitches am I actually generating here, and are they on the scale? Is a three quarter-tones up and a three quarter-tones down from the fifth actually on the scale? Of course they aren't, moron. Not unless you're in North India. Use the pitch wheel instead. (Steve Hunt doesn't abuse the mod wheel! If this particular shoe fits you, check him out.)
• using
  • weak (or no!) melodic ideas
  • weak rhythmic ideas, or NO rhythmic ideas
  Whatever happened to ideational content!? What the fuck!? Has the whole world gone mad!? Some advice: Let your ears do the thinking for you, not your fingers. If your mind and ears are not clear on what your actually playing, but your fingers are, chances are you're what is known in technical parlance as "a wanker". Muscle memory has its place, of course, in the hands of some lunatic (Yngwie or Shawn Lane, say) that's actually bothered to practice more than, say, five lame finger patterns. On keyboards, there's really no mechanical limit on how fast to press the keys down in sequence. But which keys? Therein lies the rub. Anyway, the speed issue leads me to:
• I'm sick of people trying to play 20 notes/second without getting the joke (the mechanics of the cochlea has the last laugh on you!) (When I talk about 20 notes/sec I'm talking sequentially or "horizontally", here, of course) ...it just becomes a blur.
• Horrible lead synth sounds. What's this about spectral content? Do we need harmonics in the range above 8 kHz? Are a lot of dogs going to listen to your solos? No idea what I'm talking about? Listen carefully to some real instruments. (If you've had to mix a record or two, things become clearer, in both senses!)
• Using a sequencer and passing it off as a real playing. Please! I'm sick of it! You're not fooling anyone! This joke died in 1985. It was replaced by this, much funnier, one: "Q: how many keyboard players does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None! They have machines that do that nowadays." As someone who built my first (software based) digital sequencer in 1982, I should know this: fiddling with your solos is a dead end. You won't be any happier. And neither will the poor listeners. And you won't be fooling anyone. Hey, least of all me.
• Playing in the wrong scale. I'm sick of people playing in the wrong scale!! It's very sad that this is even on here. But I'm sick of it. I'm not talking about playing outside the scale in some jazz sense, I'm talking about wanking canned licks in the wrong (modal) scale when it's obvious the rest of the music is in another (modal) scale and the "wanker" quite obviosuly is too much of a wanker to actually intend this, and tone deaf enough to not hear the difference.
• Using a lame Hammond patch. This ought to be outlawed as well. All "Hammond patches" by definition basically suck eggs. If you never played a real one for a while you'll have a hard time getting it right. Actually, I might extend that to: if you never carried a real one around on a whole tour you'll have a hard time getting it right!!

OK, but REALLY?

Anyway, if that insane diatribe didn't scare you away, you can look at a more general discussion about life as a musician, and at a file with specific advice.

UPDATE: Well, sadly, I did get some negative feedback recently (typing this Thu Jul 08 18:56:18 1999). Not one, but TWO letters via email proffering opinions as to the merits of the above information. I know this is hard to believe, but look here! The names of the perps are x'ed out to protect the guilty.

I'm not allowed to express an opinion anymore without getting inane email!? I'm supposed to give up all my hard-fought research (ahem) into what I like and don't like? I'm supposed to stop ramming my hate-speech down your throats? I don't think so!! Anyway, if I get any more ludicrous complaints, and have the time to reply, I'll add them as well..