Curious about the music industry? Find out stuff.

[BonsaiK]

* "Personal differences" - basically someone isn't getting along with someone else. This affects all genres equally. When starting a band priority #1 should be finding people who you get along with. Skill deficits can often be worked on, but an asshole is usually always going to be an asshole. Drugs and alcohol certainly have an effect on this but that's something that also applies across the board in all music styles with the exception of classical musicians who are utterly loaded with pharmaceuticals in a manner with puts other genres to shame.

Do you mean that classical musicians take a lot of pills and end up being "enhanced" by them?

In my experience classical musicians not only take all the same recreational drugs that rock musicians take in roughly equal quantities, plus the same prescribed medication that any creative-but-miserable musician might need to function in normal society, but on top of that some of them also take performance-enhancing drugs, such as drugs designed to stabilise nerves, remove shaky hands, perform better on tests etc. At the conservatorium I used to actually see people pin up ads for that stuff on noticeboards, and quite a few of the students there sure looked like they were living off that stuff.

On a side note, I've organised many musical sessions and the only time I ever got so pissed off that I had to actually sack someone on the night of a gig right before a performance and hire someone else literally at the last minute to do the job was in the case of a classical violinist who couldn't keep the needles out of his arm.

 

[Ham_authority95]

* "Personal differences" - basically someone isn't getting along with someone else. This affects all genres equally. When starting a band priority #1 should be finding people who you get along with. Skill deficits can often be worked on, but an asshole is usually always going to be an asshole. Drugs and alcohol certainly have an effect on this but that's something that also applies across the board in all music styles with the exception of classical musicians who are utterly loaded with pharmaceuticals in a manner with puts other genres to shame.

Do you mean that classical musicians take a lot of pills and end up being "enhanced" by them?

In my experience classical musicians not only take all the same recreational drugs that rock musicians take in roughly equal quantities, plus the same prescribed medication that any creative-but-miserable musician might need to function in normal society, but on top of that some of them also take performance-enhancing drugs, such as drugs designed to stabilise nerves, remove shaky hands, perform better on tests etc. At the conservatorium I used to actually see people pin up ads for that stuff on noticeboards, and quite a few of the students there sure looked like they were living off that stuff.

On a side note, I've organised many musical sessions and the only time I ever got so pissed off that I had to actually sack someone on the night of a gig right before a performance and hire someone else literally at the last minute to do the job was in the case of a classical violinist who couldn't keep the needles out of his arm.

Can't say I'm surprised. With Rock musicians, they're at least a bit more wild and free with their music, but Classical musicians are under a whole lot more pressure to be perfect with their music.

It seems pretty hard to not do drugs in the music industry...

 

[BonsaiK]

It seems pretty hard to not do drugs in the music industry...

It's do-able, but you have to be very resistant to peer pressure. There will literally be people doing drugs openly in front of you all the time, asking if you want to join in etc. Also drug dealers hover around the music business like moths to a flame, if you're involved in the business you'll get asked if you want to buy drugs a lot. I'm always happy to say no to something I don't want to do, it doesn't break my heart, but some people are stronger than others when it comes to these things.

The exception of course is the "straight-edge" scene where there's peer pressure to not do drugs. However that scene is stupid in its own ways, and their lack of drug-taking often comes hand-in-hand with rabid conservatism, organised religion, and mindless thuggery. Whatever side of the business you get into, having a really strong mind and knowing your boundaries is a must. I'd say without a doubt that the music industry is far more dangerous when it comes to leading people down the wrong paths with regard to substance abuse etc than the adult entertainment industry.

 

[Ham_authority95]

It seems pretty hard to not do drugs in the music industry...

It's do-able, but you have to be very resistant to peer pressure. There will literally be people doing drugs openly in front of you all the time, asking if you want to join in etc. Also drug dealers hover around the music business like moths to a flame, if you're involved in the business you'll get asked if you want to buy drugs a lot. I'm always happy to say no to something I don't want to do, it doesn't break my heart, but some people are stronger than others when it comes to these things.

The exception of course is the "straight-edge" scene where there's peer pressure to not do drugs. However that scene is stupid in its own ways, and their lack of drug-taking often comes hand-in-hand with rabid conservatism, organised religion, and mindless thuggery. Whatever side of the business you get into, having a really strong mind and knowing your boundaries is a must. I'd say without a doubt that the music industry is far more dangerous when it comes to leading people down the wrong paths with regard to substance abuse etc than the adult entertainment industry.

Heh, I'll have to have a few more life experiences to fully determine my tipping point in terms of peer pressure. The only people who have ever tried to get me to do drugs are idiots at the bus stop, not people I want/need to associate with...

 

[BonsaiK]

It seems pretty hard to not do drugs in the music industry...

It's do-able, but you have to be very resistant to peer pressure.

Heh, I'll have to have a few more life experiences to fully determine my tipping point in terms of peer pressure. The only people who have ever tried to get me to do drugs are idiots at the bus stop, not people I want/need to associate with...

Yeah the difference in the music biz is that it's not strangers - it'll be your best friends or people you look up to artistically or in the business doing the shit, and if you say no then that can put you on the outside of their social network. Because networking is so important, people often consent to the drugs not because they really love drugs but because they really want to be seen as someone who fits into the cool crowd - and for someone working in fields like A&R, studio engineer, management, etc, being seen as "cool" isn't just an ego thing, it actually has career ramifications. I take great pains to point out to my colleagues in the business that I'm a very tolerant person and that just because I'm not indulging in their drug habits doesn't mean that I'm making a judgement on them or that I think I'm morally superior or anything like that. In that way I'm able to finesse my way around the issue and still make my own choices. Some people still hate me or misunderstand me anyway of course, but you can't please everyone.

 

[Ham_authority95]

It seems pretty hard to not do drugs in the music industry...

It's do-able, but you have to be very resistant to peer pressure.

Heh, I'll have to have a few more life experiences to fully determine my tipping point in terms of peer pressure. The only people who have ever tried to get me to do drugs are idiots at the bus stop, not people I want/need to associate with...

Yeah the difference in the music biz is that it's not strangers - it'll be your best friends or people you look up to artistically or in the business doing the shit, and if you say no then that can put you on the outside of their social network. Because networking is so important, people often consent to the drugs not because they really love drugs but because they really want to be seen as someone who fits into the cool crowd - and for someone working in fields like A&R, studio engineer, management, etc, being seen as "cool" isn't just an ego thing, it actually has career ramifications. I take great pains to point out to my colleagues in the business that I'm a very tolerant person and that just because I'm not indulging in their drug habits doesn't mean that I'm making a judgement on them or that I think I'm morally superior or anything like that. In that way I'm able to finesse my way around the issue and still make my own choices. Some people still hate me or misunderstand me anyway of course, but you can't please everyone.

How often do your colleagues just not understand that?

 

[BonsaiK]

How often do your colleagues just not understand that?

Most of the people really close to me get it. More distant acquaintances usually start off on the wrong foot with me, eventually they usually hear through the grapevine that I'm not an intolerant asshole before I have to point it out to them. A few never get it though but they're in the minority and they're usually people that I don't have a really close relationship with.

 

[BonsaiK]

Do you know anything about Micro-tonality? If so, could you tell us "the basics" about the concept and about what music uses it? I ask this because I was reading the above post about the "450 Hz, 500 Hz, 550 Hz," system and that sounded like pretty small intervals...

On a different note, I love this thread and thank you for making it. No class in school would have covered this many subjects at once.

Sorry, I skipped over this question. Glad you're liking the thread.

The most familiar microtonal movement people will be familiar with in popular music is what blues singers and guitarists do with the minor 3rd interval. They tend to sing/play it somewhere between it and the next semitone up (the major 3rd). Most guitarists of intermediate level or above will be familiar with quarter-tone bends and these are also most commonly deployed in blues. This is by far the most common microtonal movement you hear in western music and of course anything that's in blues is also to some degree in modern pop, rock and heavy metal as these styles are all heavily blues-based.

Classical/orchestral/"serious" music didn't officially touch microtones with a ten foot pole until Harry Partch started fucking about with a 43-step scale (43 steps to the octave) of his own invention. Microtones do creep in by accident though due to the various western tuning systems. The tonal variances between just intonation and equal temperament are arguably microtonal, but both those systems are designed to not sound microtonal, they just go about the same objective through different means. Jury is out in the academic community on which one is better, but equal temperament has become the standard for purely practical reasons much to the dismay of certain purists who prefer the old way. Exceptions: vocalist emsembles don't equal temper, they try and sing completely in tune (whatever that means ehn you're a vocalist). Same with strings, and even pianos are deliberately "sweetened" when tuned. However, gypsy music has a clash between the accordion (equal temperament by default, cannot be changed) and the violin (tuned by resonating 5ths) which gives the music a unique flavour.

Bagpipes have some real microtonal oddities, I'll let this excellent website explain them: http://cityofoaks.home.netcom.com/Bagpipe_Tuning.html - now you know why the things sound so weird. The sitar and veena in Indian music also have moveable frets and they can be made to play all sorts of scales, then there's the sarod which is like a smaller fretless version of these, and Indian classical music divides the octave into 22 steps.

There's a bunch of other examples, that's a really quick overview. Not sure exactly what you wanted to know with that question, hopefully that answered something.

 

[Ham_authority95]

Do you know anything about Micro-tonality? If so, could you tell us "the basics" about the concept and about what music uses it? I ask this because I was reading the above post about the "450 Hz, 500 Hz, 550 Hz," system and that sounded like pretty small intervals...

On a different note, I love this thread and thank you for making it. No class in school would have covered this many subjects at once.

Sorry, I skipped over this question. Glad you're liking the thread.

The most familiar microtonal movement people will be familiar with in popular music is what blues singers and guitarists do with the minor 3rd interval. They tend to sing/play it somewhere between it and the next semitone up (the major 3rd). Most guitarists of intermediate level or above will be familiar with quarter-tone bends and these are also most commonly deployed in blues. This is by far the most common microtonal movement you hear in western music and of course anything that's in blues is also to some degree in modern pop, rock and heavy metal as these styles are all heavily blues-based.

Classical/orchestral/"serious" music didn't officially touch microtones with a ten foot pole until Harry Partch started fucking about with a 43-step scale (43 steps to the octave) of his own invention. Microtones do creep in by accident though due to the various western tuning systems. The tonal variances between just intonation and equal temperament are arguably microtonal, but both those systems are designed to not sound microtonal, they just go about the same objective through different means. Jury is out in the academic community on which one is better, but equal temperament has become the standard for purely practical reasons much to the dismay of certain purists who prefer the old way. Exceptions: vocalist emsembles don't equal temper, they try and sing completely in tune (whatever that means ehn you're a vocalist). Same with strings, and even pianos are deliberately "sweetened" when tuned. However, gypsy music has a clash between the accordion (equal temperament by default, cannot be changed) and the violin (tuned by resonating 5ths) which gives the music a unique flavour.

Bagpipes have some real microtonal oddities, I'll let this excellent website explain them: http://cityofoaks.home.netcom.com/Bagpipe_Tuning.html - now you know why the things sound so weird. The sitar and veena in Indian music also have moveable frets and they can be made to play all sorts of scales, then there's the sarod which is like a smaller fretless version of these, and Indian classical music divides the octave into 22 steps.

There's a bunch of other examples, that's a really quick overview. Not sure exactly what you wanted to know with that question, hopefully that answered something.

Yeah, you answered most of it. The reason i asked is because there's this bassist named Jereon Paul Theselling who studied microtones in Arabic music and developed a 72 tone system for the Fretless Bass. Those are some pretty small intervals, which made me really fascinated with the concept.

 

[BonsaiK]

The reason i asked is because there's this bassist named Jereon Paul Theselling who studied microtones in Arabic music and developed a 72 tone system for the Fretless Bass. Those are some pretty small intervals, which made me really fascinated with the concept.

The thing is that you can do microtones all you want, western ears will generally hear the result as one of the 12 tones or "something in between" one of the 12 tones. It's a bit like the situation I was talking about earlier that branched off from the Beatles discussion. Your brain will interpret whatever you hear as part of the existing system because that's the system you've been brought up with and that 99.9% of music you've heard up until this point is already in. Anything else will probably just sound "random" or "out of tune".


This guy is messing with microtones on a fretless bass but the tonal scheme is still identifiably phrygian with a raised 3rd (a mode of the upward-travelling harmonic minor where the 7th is raised). And that's a diatonic system. In other words your ear will filter out what doesn't fit into the diatonic system as "something else" and lock into the things that are diatonic as important.

Of course, the player is playing mainly diatonic anyway and that's just locking the brain into diatonic mode - he can faff about with slides all he wants but if he keeps landing on the root note. the minor 2nd and major 3rd all the time, the brain will still interpret it as "arabic stuff" whether he does the slides or not. To really force something else besides diatonic harmony down a person's throat you need to do something like this:


And that just sounds like an out-of-tune piano playing some modernist stuff to me. There's no "new sound" there, if you didn't know that you were listening to a quarter-tone piano just then, your brain would just listen to that and go "sounds like an out of tune piano", or "gee the recording seems to be speeding up and slowing down", not "gosh wow a new scale I never thought of".

 

[Ham_authority95]

The reason i asked is because there's this bassist named Jereon Paul Theselling who studied microtones in Arabic music and developed a 72 tone system for the Fretless Bass. Those are some pretty small intervals, which made me really fascinated with the concept.

The thing is that you can do microtones all you want, western ears will generally hear the result as one of the 12 tones or "something in between" one of the 12 tones. It's a bit like the situation I was talking about earlier that branched off from the Beatles discussion. Your brain will interpret whatever you hear as part of the existing system because that's the system you've been brought up with and that 99.9% of music you've heard up until this point is already in. Anything else will probably just sound "random" or "out of tune".


This guy is messing with microtones on a fretless bass but the tonal scheme is still identifiably phrygian with a raised 3rd (a mode of the upward-travelling harmonic minor where the 7th is raised). And that's a diatonic system. In other words your ear will filter out what doesn't fit into the diatonic system as "something else" and lock into the things that are diatonic as important.

Of course, the player is playing mainly diatonic anyway and that's just locking the brain into diatonic mode - he can faff about with slides all he wants but if he keeps landing on the root note. the minor 2nd and major 3rd all the time, the brain will still interpret it as "arabic stuff" whether he does the slides or not. To really force something else besides diatonic harmony down a person's throat you need to do something like this:


And that just sounds like an out-of-tune piano playing some modernist stuff to me. There's no "new sound" there, if you didn't know that you were listening to a quarter-tone piano just then, your brain would just listen to that and go "sounds like an out of tune piano", or "gee the recording seems to be speeding up and slowing down", not "gosh wow a new scale I never thought of".

I generally agree with you. Whenever I hear "Arabic" stuff and want to play it, I naturally just use the Phyrgian scale with a bunch of string bends, not anything outside of my natural diatonic way of thinking.

The piano thing sounded really cool to me after I got pat the fact that it sounded like it was sped up, by the way. Maybe I should listen to more of that to get used to other scale systems...

 

[BonsaiK]

The piano thing sounded really cool to me after I got pat the fact that it sounded like it was sped up, by the way. Maybe I should listen to more of that to get used to other scale systems...

What happens with the piano piece is your brain will instead lock into the chromatic movements because that's the "next most familiar" thing after any identifiable scale pattern. There's plenty of quarter-tone music out there, Charles Ives wrote a bunch, but chances of you rewiring your brain at this late stage of the game are slim. You can certainly grow to like the sound but you'll probably always perceive it relative to the things you already know, rather than the completely new system that it's trying to be.

 

[Ham_authority95]

The piano thing sounded really cool to me after I got pat the fact that it sounded like it was sped up, by the way. Maybe I should listen to more of that to get used to other scale systems...

What happens with the piano piece is your brain will instead lock into the chromatic movements because that's the "next most familiar" thing after any identifiable scale pattern. There's plenty of quarter-tone music out there, Charles Ives wrote a bunch, but chances of you rewiring your brain at this late stage of the game are slim. You can certainly grow to like the sound but you'll probably always perceive it relative to the things you already know, rather than the completely new system that it's trying to be.

I'll certainly look at some of his work. Now I wonder what would happen to my future childerns' musical taste if I played them micro-tonal music at first instead of regular western music...

It would probably fuck up their sense of the traditional 12 western notes, thus impairing some of their musical ability, that's for sure.

 

[Ham_authority95]

The piano thing sounded really cool to me after I got pat the fact that it sounded like it was sped up, by the way. Maybe I should listen to more of that to get used to other scale systems...

What happens with the piano piece is your brain will instead lock into the chromatic movements because that's the "next most familiar" thing after any identifiable scale pattern. There's plenty of quarter-tone music out there, Charles Ives wrote a bunch, but chances of you rewiring your brain at this late stage of the game are slim. You can certainly grow to like the sound but you'll probably always perceive it relative to the things you already know, rather than the completely new system that it's trying to be.

On another note, after listening to that music for 20 minutes, playing a major scale on a guitar is the musical equivilent of a drink of water after eating nothing but dark chocolate for a day.

 

[Ham_authority95]

When did you get more "well known" in your music scene, both by listeners and other industry people?

 

[BonsaiK]

When did you get more "well known" in your music scene, both by listeners and other industry people?

As far as listeners are concerned, probably when I started touring with a certain band. As for industry folks, I'd say my involvement with certain radio stations and record labels was more noticeable than my band activity. I don't want to go into detail about any of this for reasons of preserving anonymity, but being well-known, even on the quite small scale that I'm well-known, is not something that I'd recommend people strive for. If I could make the same amount of money doing the same stuff while receiving none of the corresponding fame, that would be a far preferable option, but being involved in this industry requires living in the public eye at least a little because that's somewhat related to getting the dollars flowing.

 

[Ham_authority95]

When did you get more "well known" in your music scene, both by listeners and other industry people?

As far as listeners are concerned, probably when I started touring with a certain band. As for industry folks, I'd say my involvement with certain radio stations and record labels was more noticeable than my band activity. I don't want to go into detail about any of this for reasons of preserving anonymity, but being well-known, even on the quite small scale that I'm well-known, is not something that I'd recommend people strive for. If I could make the same amount of money doing the same stuff while receiving none of the corresponding fame, that would be a far preferable option, but being involved in this industry requires living in the public eye at least a little because that's somewhat related to getting the dollars flowing.

Why don't you "recommend" it? Don't you have to get kind of famous anyway if you're working in an entertainment industry?

 

[BonsaiK]

When did you get more "well known" in your music scene, both by listeners and other industry people?

As far as listeners are concerned, probably when I started touring with a certain band. As for industry folks, I'd say my involvement with certain radio stations and record labels was more noticeable than my band activity. I don't want to go into detail about any of this for reasons of preserving anonymity, but being well-known, even on the quite small scale that I'm well-known, is not something that I'd recommend people strive for. If I could make the same amount of money doing the same stuff while receiving none of the corresponding fame, that would be a far preferable option, but being involved in this industry requires living in the public eye at least a little because that's somewhat related to getting the dollars flowing.

Why don't you "recommend" it? Don't you have to get kind of famous anyway if you're working in an entertainment industry?

Yes, you do, which was exactly my point.

Why I don't recommend fame on general principle: it makes your friends jealous and envious, sometimes they're jealous of the money that they think you're getting, even if your contract is in fact screwing you over and you're in fact getting nothing. It's really hard to explain to someone that you're as broke as they are when your face is all over the TV and theirs isn't, now that's an awkward conversation. People also get jealous of the attention that you're getting. Mind you all of that "attention" is really just a result of a promotional machine at work striving to get you that attention, it's got nothing to do with people thinking you're a great person or anything like that, in other words it's not really people giving you attention any more than paying a hooker $100 an hour to sit in a room with you and hold your hand is a real relationship. People who get into the business in the secret hope that fame will bring them adulation and fill some sort of emotional void find that they never achieve this, and often drugs end up being what fills that void... but anyway people are brought up to believe that fame is some amazing thing. If you achieve it, even in small doses, other people start to get nasty and try to cut down the tall poppy.

There's more but I have to get back to work, I'll post again later.

 

[BonsaiK]

Okay, part 2:

Because fame holds such an unbelievably stupid high level of social currency, it tends to poison all your interactions. When you're a known person and someone is talking to you, you never know if they actually genuinely give a shit about anything you say apart from its use as a soundbite to quote to somebody else, or evidence the conversation in fact occured, and they certainly very rarely care about you as an individual person other than the abstracted "fame" concept - perhaps they just want to talk to you so they can brag to their friends afterward about how they got to talk to you. Or maybe they want to gain something from themselves from the interaction, like career advancement, or money, or notoriety, or a good story, or whatever. The more famous you are, the more chance there is that anyone approaching you has an agenda which doesn't include your well-being (because they assume that everything with you is fine, after all, you're famous, so therefore on the eyes of the multitude you don't have real needs or problems). Most celebrities respond to this by hiring security and having a very tight-knit circle of people looking after their interests - people they can trust. Of course, perhaps they can't even trust those people. You never know, and it's this constant not ever really knowing who your real friends are that fucks with the head of famous people big-time. Of course, you're grateful for the fact that people like what you're doing, but you certainly learn quick that you can't trust the random man on the street. The proximity to fame makes people act in very unpredicatable ways. This is also the reason why famous people usually only tend to have relationships with other famous people - at least you know another famous person probably is dealing with the same shit you are, and isn't trying to get any "reflected glory" after all they already have their own career...

The last time I had to talk to a very, very famous person to do a phone interview (he shall remain nameless but he had a new album in the US top 10 and was all over the print media at the time) I couldn't just ring him up and talk to him, even though I was given what was supposedly "his mobile number". I had to go through various layers of "people" who would vet the call, and make sure I was ringing from a legitimate purpose, then I would move forward to the next stage. First it was the label's American arm, then it was the tour manager, then the guy's personal assistant, and then finally the guy in question. And he was on the toilet for the entire conversation, he actually willingly did the interview on the bowl. It was his fifth interview that morning. That's another thing about fame - you get really busy. You work a lot more hours than a 9 to 5. You need personal assistants etc. If you want to have time off everyone gets all shitty because they can't get a hold of you, because you're famous therefore in their eyes you should be chilling out on some yacht somewhere and have allthe time in the world. In reality you've got appointments, meetings, touring schedules, flights you have to be on, interviews, concerts to do or an album to make or whatever and somewhere in the middle of all this you also need to do all that human biological stuff like eating. Fame is many things but it's not a leisure activity - it's hilariously ironic to me that it seems to attract chiefly lazy people who are attracted to it because the 9 to 5 lifestyle seems like too much work...

 

[Ham_authority95]

Fame is many things but it's not a leisure activity - it's hilariously ironic to me that it seems to attract chiefly lazy people who are attracted to it because the 9 to 5 lifestyle seems like too much work...

Thanks for the well-written response.

From were I am now, for a 15 year-old, I'm still busy as fuck, with School from 8-4, then music lessons, then rehearsals with bands, then pep band games, then any gigs, then girlfriend, then eating, then fucking around on the internet. Now that I imagine that I suddenly became a great songwriter/performer and you saw people on The Escapists bitching about how I'm ruining music, its because of your posts my current situation would be ultimately be preferable.

I'd also say that having aspirations of being famous depends on how egotistical a person is, as well. I'm pretty egotistical myself(you can tell that from how many times I just used "I"), and until your above posts, I thought that being famous would be pretty cool because it would feed my ego, in addition to the other shit.


Now it doesn't seem so hot at all, considering that the guy you called couldn't even escape from people while taking a shit.

In fact, the above posts would have shattered all aspirations I've had for doing anything music-related if I didn't love music so much in the first place.