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[BonsaiK]

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 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(this can all be switched around depending on my schedule). 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, 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 like hot shit at all, considering that the guy you called couldn't even escape from people while taking a shit.

Using fame to feed your ego would be a bad situation for you - or anybody. The problem with people who do that is that it's fine if they're flavour of the month, but if things go sour and they've vested all their emotional eggs in the adulation of strangers, when that's taken away they experience a fairly extreme and frightening downward spiral. And let's face it, almost no celebrities receive universal acclaim, they almost all get hated at one point or another in their career, it just comes with the territory. Imagine bringing out an album and everyone in the media hates it. Imagine going on a stage and nobody wants to hear anything you play except the one song you got famous for ten years ago. Imagine going on The Escapist and reading a hate-thread about yourself and how the songs you spent the last year working on are "manufactured garbage". The celebrities who are strong enough to cope with that are the ones who aren't using fame as something to feed their secretly fragile sense of self. It's fine to have an ego, we all have one, but just don't use the reactions of others to fuel it - your sense of self should come from within, not from what some collective of strangers thinks. That way, when those strangers suddenly decide for whatever reason that you're a dickhead, you can just go "oh well - that's their opinion" rather than have a nervous breakdown over it.

 

[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 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(this can all be switched around depending on my schedule). 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, 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 like hot shit at all, considering that the guy you called couldn't even escape from people while taking a shit.

Using fame to feed your ego would be a bad situation for you - or anybody. The problem with people who do that is that it's fine if they're flavour of the month, but if things go sour and they've vested all their emotional eggs in the adulation of strangers, when that's taken away they experience a fairly extreme and frightening downward spiral. And let's face it, almost no celebrities receive universal acclaim, they almost all get hated at one point or another in their career, it just comes with the territory. Imagine bringing out an album and everyone in the media hates it. Imagine going on a stage and nobody wants to hear anything you play except the one song you got famous for ten years ago. Imagine going on The Escapist and reading a hate-thread about yourself and how the songs you spent the last year working on are "manufactured garbage". The celebrities who are strong enough to cope with that are the ones who aren't using fame as something to feed their secretly fragile sense of self. It's fine to have an ego, we all have one, but just don't use the reactions of others to fuel it - your sense of self should come from within, not from what some collective of strangers thinks. That way, when those strangers suddenly decide for whatever reason that you're a dickhead, you can just go "oh well - that's their opinion" rather than have a nervous breakdown over it.

In that situation you become other peoples' opinion rather than anything you've made.

 

[xedi]

Who is determining the loudness of a concert and on which considerations is the loudness
based?

While on rock and pop concerts I think it is mostly fine, in heavier rock and metal concerts I do not get it, who hates ears so much that he wants to destroy all of them. When I went to my first metal concert in a rather little club, I did not think about wearing earplugs, since I was fine with my ears before that event. However, the volume was incredibly painful and screwed my ears for three months (tinnitus). Now, I would to a certain degree understand the volume, if I would be the only one with sensitive ears, however, at the mentioned concert almost everybody wore earplugs (and I do since then). I just don't understand who and why you would put the volume at such high levels, that virtually everybody decides to wear earplugs (and from my experience people are rather hesitant to use them).

 

[BonsaiK]

Who is determining the loudness of a concert and on which considerations is the loudness
based?

While on rock and pop concerts I think it is mostly fine, in heavier rock and metal concerts I do not get it, who hates ears so much that he wants to destroy all of them. When I went to my first metal concert in a rather little club, I did not think about wearing earplugs, since I was fine with my ears before that event. However, the volume was incredibly painful and screwed my ears for three months (tinnitus). Now, I would to a certain degree understand the volume, if I would be the only one with sensitive ears, however, at the mentioned concert almost everybody wore earplugs (and I do since then). I just don't understand who and why you would put the volume at such high levels, that virtually everybody decides to wear earplugs (and from my experience people are rather hesitant to use them).

Volume is decided by the following factors:

* How loud the band wants to be
* How loud the sound engineer wants the band to be
* How loud the PA system will actually go
* What the venue owners consider to be a desirable level
* Any local laws or noise restrictions

This varies between different venues, styles of music and so forth. Heavy metal bands obviously want to be louder than country bands, it's just part of the style - heavy rhythm rhythm guitar just doesn't sound any good quiet. What may suprise you is that the volume of rock and metal concerts has actually steadily decreased since the 1970s. In those days bands used to just blast everyone with hard volume, but nowadays advancements in psychoacoustics and PA sub-bass technology mean that it's possible to make people think they are listening to a sound much louder than what they really are.

I've been wearing earplugs since just about every concert I've ever been to (on either side of the stage) since 1996. I highly recommend them. Three months of ear-ringing is a bit unusual, after a show mine will ring only until the next morning. I think only once my ears were still ringing the next day. Maybe you do have unusually sensitive ears in which case... yeah, earplugs. The foam ones are the crappiest ones, you can get sillica ones that are practically invisible if you're worried about not looking the part or getting hassled. Audio engineers should get custom-made ones that are molded to your ear shape and cut all frequencies more or less evenly, so they don't mix bands incorrectly due to the treble-cutting properties of cheap plugs.

 

[MisterGobbles]

I recently got a bunch of high quality drum samples on a program that does drum loops. However, I want to use the samples to make custom drum tracks. Could you recommend any program, free or otherwise, that can easily track samples to make drum tracks? Easy to use would be preferable, but even if it's not that would still be ok.

 

[Keepitclean]

That was mean. I did listen all the way through but I needed a breather halfway through.

My question is what do companies see in this band? Did they get exposure because htye are different? They are not a good kind of different IMO. I don't know anyone who even remotely likes them.

 

[Ham_authority95]

That was mean. I did listen all the way through but I needed a breather halfway through.

My question is what do companies see in this band? Did they get exposure because htye are different? They are not a good kind of different IMO. I don't know anyone who even remotely likes them.

"Sweet, a dance song that I can death-growl and scream to rather than try to sing to."

That's part of the appeal right there, so unless you know anyone who wants a dance-able song without a melody to get stuck in their head, you won't encounter anyone who likes this in your social circles.

 

[MisterGobbles]

They are not a good kind of different IMO. I don't know anyone who even remotely likes them.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Actually, I know quite a lot of people who like this band. They are not good, but I do remotely like them - not because they have talent, oh god no. I can tolerate their newest album simply because of the beats.

There are quite a lot of bands like this, and I can tell you without a doubt that this is the best one. Let that sink in for a second.

It's just rap music where the vocals are screamed (not very well). Not very good, not inherently terrible (although most of the songs are objectively bad), it's just rap music.

Oh jesus, did I just defend BrokeNCYDE? Good lord...

 

[BonsaiK]

I recently got a bunch of high quality drum samples on a program that does drum loops. However, I want to use the samples to make custom drum tracks. Could you recommend any program, free or otherwise, that can easily track samples to make drum tracks? Easy to use would be preferable, but even if it's not that would still be ok.

You can get the individual drum sounds, and either re-sample them or directly load them into a "tracker" program. There are plenty of free tracker programs available that can sequence samples of drums or any other type of sound you can imagine. Then you can build your own beats using the same sounds. The first tracker programs were 8-bit and came out for the Amiga and bands have actually recorded whole albums this way. Nowadays we've got stuff like FruityLoops (and yes there's a free version which is quite useable) but there are many other trackers, some free, some not, and they all do more or less the same job. It really doesn't matter which one you use. They all rate fairly similar on the "ease of use" scale too, which is to say, not very, but anyone who can learn how to play an RPG should be theoretically able to learn a music program interface.

 

[BonsaiK]

That was mean. I did listen all the way through but I needed a breather halfway through.

My question is what do companies see in this band? Did they get exposure because htye are different? They are not a good kind of different IMO. I don't know anyone who even remotely likes them.

Gosh, people defending Brokencyde on my behalf, who would've thought in this place.

What do record companies see in it? Dollar signs, I suspect.

Spoiler: a press release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Brokencyde?s ?I?m Not A Fan But The Kids Like It?
Sells 6,293 Copies To Debut At #87 On Billboard Top 200
***
#87 DEBUT ON THE BILLBOARD TOP 200
#11 ALBUM ON THE INDIE CHART
#19 INDIE BAND ON MYSPACE APPROACHING 40 MILLION PLAYS
ON ALL DATES OF THE VANS WARPED TOUR

I?M NOT A FAN...
?If you share any similarity with a band like brokeNCYDE you?re almost guaranteed to have me not like your band?-Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey)

?If I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother?s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment?-NME

?There is absolutely no substance whatsoever in their songs and no passion in anything they do. It is the musical equivalent of a snow cone?-SENSES FAIL?s Buddy Nielsen

?A musical version of The Goonies?.If this is the future of music, we?re outta here?-KERRANG!

?it really is one of those "fall of Western culture" moments. It?s a near-perfect snapshot of everything that?s sh#t about this point in the culture?-Marvel/DC Comic Book writer WARREN ELLIS

"Have you ever heard of a band called brokeNCYDE? I just want to say to that no matter what type of music you like, that sh#t sucks?-THURSDAY?s Geoff Rickly

?Each element is so precisely calibrated to infuriate me, limp Cookie Monster screeching and enough Antares slathered about to make even Kanye bleed out his eye sockets?-L.A. Times

?These guys need a Nobel Peace Prize for Band Embodying the Most Contradictions Ever?-MTVU

?BUT THE KIDS LIKE IT!!!

They might just be the most hated band in America, but Albuquerque, NM based have silenced critics and haters by debuting at #87 on the Billboard Top 200 this week. The group?s debut album ?I?m Not A Fan But The Kids Like It? sold 6,293 copies in the first week to blow past Billboard?s Heatseekers Chart and crack the Top 100, while landing at #11 on the Independent album charts. The news confirms how powerful Brokencyde?s crunkcore movement has become, as the group continues to take over the scene once dominated by the band?s detractors.

?What an unbelievable feeling to know that our fans have reacted so strongly to our new album. It is amazing to see our album charting right alongside some of the artists we love and respect. We owe everything to our fans who have always supported and believed in what we are trying to do,? commented Mikl from Brokencyde. ?I hope this sends a message to everyone that our music is here to stay and this is only the beginning of the crunkcore movement.?

One listen to Brokencyde?s ?I?m Not A Fan But The Kids Like It? is all it takes to get hooked on the group?s infectious sound. The album?s mishmash of screamo and hip-hop creates a highly addictive and original sound than can only be defined as crunkcore. ?I?m Not A Fan But The Kids Like It? features guest appearances platinum hip-hop artist E-40 and Daddy X of the Kottonmouth Kings.

Brokencyde?s new single ?Booty Call? has quickly become one of the hottest tracks of the year in just under a month. Upon release, the song immediately became one of iTunes most downloaded tracks and has registered well over a million plays on MySpace. The video for ?Booty Call? can be viewed online at http://www.youtube.com/brokencyde.

Brokencyde will be getting crunk all summer long performing on this summer?s Warped Tour alongside All Time Low, Forever the Sickest Kids, A Day To Remember and 3OH!3 amongst others.

That's from a Brokencyde press release. In other words, that's not an independent article, that's a statement delivered to the media that the band and/or their record company wrote themselves. And it's full of highly respected people and industry bodies giving negative comments. Why would they do that? Because all new styles of music were hated when they first appeared. Metalheads love Napalm Death's "Scum" album these days but trying to find someone willing to say a kind word about it in the 80s was pretty challenging. Led Zeppelin couldn't get a good review to save themselves when they first appeared, and in retrospect they're considered one of the most important bands of their era. The Clash were universally hated. Black Sabbath, the generally-accepted forefathers on an entire new style of music, were raked over the critical coals when they first appeared, the press for them in the 70s was also universally negative (and I really do mean universally - the critical reaction was identical to Brokencyde), and fans of 60s rock despised the new sound, criticising it as too simple, lacking in talent, all about image, obsessed with themes unhealthy for young people and extremely loud/annoying, and hoped like hell that they wouldn't start a trend. Sound familiar? If you're going "but.... they sound good, Brokencyde don't", well, plenty of people disagree as the sales figures in the press release show. People aren't buying it because they hate it.

The "crunkcore" sound is just the natural intersection of a few currents that have been happening in music for some time now. Screamed voals were the domain only of extreme metal once, but as time has gone on and people have grown used to the sound, it has cropped up in increasingly mainstream styles. It was only a matter of time before it started showing up in pop music. Rap music has been getting more and more commercial each passing year and has recently overtaken country music as the #1 most popular niche style of music in the US, and rap and pop have been flirting with each other ever since Blondie's "Rapture". It was all going to collide eventually.

If you don't like it, that's okay - not everyone likes everything. People complain about pop sounding the same, and when a pop band does something genuinely different, people complain about that too. People just like to complain about popular music because it's popular. Anyway I think the song sounds great, as a singer I really appreciate the double-meaning in the song title, and furthermore it's sweetly ironic that Steve Albini hates them because I instantly think of the Albini-produced Whitehouse's ear-piercing WASP noises that this tune sounds like it's directly influenced by. When new shit happens the old guard always whine, historically that's how it's always been, and not just with music.

 

[ChaoticKraus]

While i don't like those Brokencyde kids screamo and auto-tune shouting/rap i must say that beat is seriously heavy. Gotta get the instrumental for that.

And now the proper question, what is R&B really? Given how it's grouped together with rap under "Urban" i would guess that it would be like singing but over hip-hop beats. But that sounds more like the realm of some popstars (Beyonce, Bruno Mars) but maybe that's some kind of pop-R&B?

I've seen people claim that everything from Justin Bieber to "In Da Club" to be R&B so i'm kind of confused. I guess you would know the proper definition?

 

[BonsaiK]

While i don't like those Brokencyde kids screamo and auto-tune shouting/rap i must say that beat is seriously heavy. Gotta get the instrumental for that.

And now the proper question, what is R&B really? Given how it's grouped together with rap under "Urban" i would guess that it would be like singing but over hip-hop beats. But that sounds more like the realm of some popstars (Beyonce, Bruno Mars) but maybe that's some kind of pop-R&B?

I've seen people claim that everything from Justin Bieber to "In Da Club" to be R&B so i'm kind of confused. I guess you would know the proper definition?

R&B stands for "Rhythm & Blues" and it originally meant upbeat blues and jazz music (i.e blues/jazz guitar plus the rhythm of drumming). Because this style was originally associated with the black Americans who created the blues style, It's been used in the US as a catch-all for "popular music by black people", or "music that sounds a bit like other popular music that black people make" (which is how Bieber gets the tag) ever since. Therefore, 40's upbeat blues/jazz, 70's soul music and modern rap-lite and pop all get the R&B tag.

If you're thinking "gosh, that actually seems a little bit racist", then you'd be right - the term "R&B" replaced the term "race records" which was originally used to describe popular music by black American performers. Those performers use that term to describe their own material quite willingly, but in the post-war era "race records" was gradually perceived more and more negatively by customers, so a newer term was found that would offend less people but essentially meant the same thing, and that term was R&B. "Urban" also means the same thing.

 

[ChaoticKraus]

They actually had a thing called "race records? No wonder it got relabeled. I see why the definition is fragmented though, thanks for more useful knowledge!

 

[Small Waves]

it's sweetly ironic that Steve Albini hates them because I instantly think of the Albini-produced Whitehouse's ear-piercing WASP noises that this tune sounds like it's directly influenced by. When new shit happens the old guard always whine, historically that's how it's always been, and not just with music.

I'm not surprised about Steve's hatred for brokeNCYDE in the least, considering he has crapped all over better artists and accused acts like Sonic Youth of selling out for commercial success. As from being insufferably bad, he probably strongly dislikes their music is extremely digital, what with being a man who fancies analogue recording. There's effects EVERYWHERE on I'm Not A Fan.

 

[BonsaiK]

it's sweetly ironic that Steve Albini hates them because I instantly think of the Albini-produced Whitehouse's ear-piercing WASP noises that this tune sounds like it's directly influenced by. When new shit happens the old guard always whine, historically that's how it's always been, and not just with music.

I'm not surprised about Steve's hatred for brokeNCYDE in the least, considering he has crapped all over better artists and accused acts like Sonic Youth of selling out for commercial success. As from being insufferably bad, he probably strongly dislikes their music is extremely digital, what with being a man who fancies analogue recording. There's effects EVERYWHERE on I'm Not A Fan.

Including a lot of analog effects, like tone-generators, analog delay, and synth. Analog synths in particular have been firmly entrenched in dance music since the mid 1990s. Auto-tune and sampling are the only effects in Brokencyde's music that I can think of off the top of my head that can't be produced by analog means, and the song I linked above doesn't even have Auto-tune at all. The song is built from looped samples... of analog effects.

Of course Albini will argue that it's the digital recording process itself that's the issue, and that it can never sound as 'pure' as an analog studio. He's absolutely right. However, the differences aren't anything that someone who isn't an audiophile is going to care about. He doesn't like the way the music is created and that's fine - it's not for him.

 

[Aur0ra145]

Whatever happened to good old Texas country music?

 

[BonsaiK]

Whatever happened to good old Texas country music?

You'll have to be a bit more specific about what you mean if you want me to answer that. "Texas" is self-explanatory, but "good" and "old" are both relative terms, and "country" is also pretty subjective, you'll have to pin all of this down a bit more precisely if you want a serious answer to this question.

 

[Ham_authority95]

Are there any general "rules" for appearing on-air for a radio station?

 

[BonsaiK]

Are there any general "rules" for appearing on-air for a radio station?

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you be more specific, or give an example?

 

[Ham_authority95]

Are there any general "rules" for appearing on-air for a radio station?

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you be more specific, or give an example?

Say its my first day on a radio show, and its a "Talk for 20 minutes, then a couple songs" type show, what would you advice me to do and not do?