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Okie dokie. For the "Old" I'm looking more towards the Jerry Jeff Walker type of artist. We have some of his protege's like Robert Earl Keen (though he tends to lean more towards a southern rock sorta guy), though why don't we have more of this? Demand might be satisfied with Jerry, but more is always better.BonsaiK said:
I've seen a large shift in the 'good' music from around here shifting more towards a southern rock sort of thing, and they call it country. i.e. Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Josh Abbott, Randy Rogers, etc. Now these guys are great, but it's really starting to leave the older Walker type roots I believe them to have come from. I might be completely wrong about this.
I don't like the Nashville country at all. Reba could die tomorrow and the world would be a much better place.
Well to be honest, there's not much point going into it too much, because if you were to ever find yourself in that position, you would have been trained by the radio station in proper announcing techniques before they even allowed you to go to air. And 20 minutes is a LOT of time to talk on-air while keeping things interesting, that'd be a stretch for even a seasoned professional. If you were just starting out DJing you probably wouldn't want to talk in brackets of more than two minutes at a time between playing other content such as music, interviews, news, etc.Ham_authority95 said:
So I guess your question amounts to "things you are likely to be told in a radio training session" and that would include:
* How to project your voice into a mic
* How to avoid defaming people and say libelious things (one lawsuit is all it takes to take down a radio station permanently)
* Desk operation
* Interview techniques
* How to not be boring
* That "comedy" shows are shit and nobody should ever do one, ever
That sort of thing. Don't worry - they will train you.
I guess the reason why you don't see many people aping the style you like these days in the mainstream is because country music has always been mainstream music, and as pop music has changed over the years country music has changed with it. The old guys weren't doing anything anti-commercial at the time, far from it, they were trying really, really hard to be as successful as possible and as such a lot of the country music from the 40s and 50s doesn't sound wildly different to a lot of the pop music and rock and roll from that era, when you compare them. The line that separates country and pop/rock has always been very, very thin. There was plenty of country/southern rock mish-mash going on in the 70s and that's fairly obvious, but what isn't so obvious is that a lot of the "traditional" country music was also a country/rock mish-mash when it first appeared, they were just using the rock of the time, as opposed to the rock these days. The country ballads also don't sound awfully different to the same era's pop ballads, the only differences using being the addition of occasional slide guitar, major pentatonic scales, and maybe the singer wears a hat. Just like Taylor Swift doesn't sound a lot different to Pink when you get down to the nitty-gritty of musical content, but one gets to play at the Country Music Awards and one does not. Country has always been as much of a musical brand than an actual musical style, the one thing that makes an artist country above any other is simple categorisation, nothing more.Aur0ra145 said:
To demonstrate: are these songs country?
You definitely won't find them filed as such in any music store, yet all the traditional stylistic elements are correct and present, and the reason why is because neither of those groups carry the "country brand" - so they can sound as country as they want, it'll never matter without a corresponding "brand change". What about these, do you think they qualify as "country rock"?
It's this sort of realisation that I believe made Johnny Cash cover all thse rock songs late in his career - he realised that the thing that made them country was purely the fact that he was playing the songs, regardless of all other factors. His version of Hurt (to take the most well-known example) is really more or less identical to the Nine Inch Nails version and they're supposedly an "industrial rock" group, do a few changed lyrics and some very slight textural differences really make it a different "musical style"?
I don't think it does. I think country is like a textural, lyrical and ideological "costume" that you can use to dress up a song in a certain direction, but musically it's still pop music, or rock music, or whatever. So to answer your question, of what happened to the old country music, it did what the old pop and rock music did - it became new pop and rock and country music. There's still artists performing in that style though, and there'll probably always still be a few, because after all, the music has its fans.
So my friends' metal band have been "making it"; non-stop shows, a reasonable buzz, hundreds of thousands of views on Myspace, etc, etc. Chances are you'll hear of them in your workplace at some point in the near future if they don't fuck up and maintain their work ethic.
Anyway, they've just been offered a three-week tour in Europe this summer. The problem is, I doubt that they have the logistical insight to tour over-seas when they have no roadies, little money(unless their parents pitch in), and have only really played shows locally.
What should they get ready to do if they want to do this tour successfully?
Anyway, they've just been offered a three-week tour in Europe this summer. The problem is, I doubt that they have the logistical insight to tour over-seas when they have no roadies, little money(unless their parents pitch in), and have only really played shows locally.
What should they get ready to do if they want to do this tour successfully?
Ahhh, now I know where a lot of my advice has been going...Ham_authority95 said:
Flights: get all their passports and visas sorted accordingly. There's endless stories of international tours have have been cancelled at the last minute due to a visa fuck-up on the part of a band member that has stopped them entering a certain country. If you rock up at an airport with a "holiday" visa instead of a "working visa" and security find out you're in the country for a national tour which has the intention of, amongst other things, making money (because you did something silly like tell the guy the gate the truth about what all those guitars were for) you might just get told to GTFO back to your own country. That's just one example of something that happens to naive bands quite a bit but talk to your travel agent because different countries have different rules. Also if some of your band members have European parents check the rules to see if they qualify for dual citizenship. Be warned that dual citizenship has its benefits in terms of travel but is a two-way street, and this may also in some cases mean fun surprises like mandatory armed services enlistment!
Accomodation: Do this band already have fans in Europe? If so, now's a good time to start hitting up people on their social network of choice for things like addresses for places they can crash while on tour. Other bands on bills may also be able to help out with that, most are more than happy to have an overseas band sleeping in their lounge room. But if you network with enough people you should never have to pay for accomodation while over there.
Transport on the road: Europe isn't huge plus it's heavily populated so it's easy to tour in. I'd recommend getting a hire car if you can (if the band are young this may be prohibitive though - even if they're over driving age most hire car companies won't even talk to you if you're under 25), but if not then public transport across Europe doesn't suck anywhere near as much as it does in Australia, it's actually viable to do an entire tour this way. However there's also gear. Guitars can be carried on a bus but that's about all. If they've been "offered" a tour then that means someone over ther has already hopefully organised something of some description... ask them. They'll know if nothing else that you can't carry a bass amplifier on a plane so ask the organiser about equipment arrangements, if you strike it lucky and they're organised then the band will either be granted access to a vehicle for the tour and gear will be provided by the organiser somehow. If on the other hand their reaction to a "what's ger are we using and where's it coming from" type question is "wut" then make sure this side of things is agreed to before too much else happens. In a worst-case scenario local support bands probably won't say no to you borrowing their gear, but you want to use that situation as a last resort.
Money: Your friend's band should not go into this expecting to make money, although they may in fact do so, they should budget for the worst case scenario of their income being no more than what is absolutely guaranteed (in writing!) by the person who is setting up the tour. If they don't have or aren't being given enough money to get over there and get back, then they need to ask the organiser how badly they want the band to play over there. If the organiser expects the band to pay to come over, plus pay all their own logistic costs, then how is the band going to recoup that money? I won't tour anywhere unless I can either A. afford it on my own or B. someone else is paying - upfront.
Language: you'd be surprised how easy it is to get by, and how quickly you start to pick up the essential things about other languages that require you to get by when you're in a non-Engish speaking country. Don't sweat it. Just come prepared with a crash-course phrasebook and the addresses of some embassies. However, cultural stuff can be really important, so read up heavily on the accepted practices of culture in whatever countries you visit.
A lot more I can say about this subject but I probably haven't the travel experience to do the topic as much justice as someone else might. I tend to be the one sending other people on tour and then asking them how it went, rather than touring myself. But those are the very very basics though.
To tell you the truth, they kind of figured it out on their own(or they got a great manager).BonsaiK said:
But yeah, thanks for replying. I'm sure that they'll consult their manager on the subject and get a similar answer from him, but I'll relay this post to their E-mail box anyway...
If what you mean is my personal taste being somewhat dulled due to exposure to so much music - no, if anything the reverse because it really hits me over the head when I hear something interesting and different. When you get inundated with hundreds of soundalike bands with no real spark to their songwriting, you really apprecaite it when something a bit better comes along. I guess perhaps I'm a little more cynical when I hear about a new band than most but I'll still give it a listen before I judge.Ham_authority95 said:
If what you meant was something else, then let me know what that something else is and I'll do my best to answer.
The rehearsal place were my band hangs out at is letting us go into a studio to record an EP-type project, so when we do that should I get the contact info of every engineer/musician I meet there?
Well, that could be being a bit full-on. What you really want to do is establish a good rapport with whoever you're working with. Networking in the music business is a bit like going out and trying to meet girls - if you hit on everyone for their number, you'll just appear like a desperate loser and no-one will want anything to do with you so the numbers themselves are in fact worthless, because even if you collect a bunch of numbers after that process no-one is going to want to talk to you. On the other hand if you take the time to build a genuine interaction with one or two really cool people then often those people don't mind giving you their number and sometimes they'll even just offer it straight up. You should definitely get the engineer's contact number (provided he doesn't suck, and isn't an asshole, of course), which he'll happily give you as long as your band isn't a pain in the neck to work with, because it probably means more work and more money for him. It never hurts to know a good engineer. What matters is not the number, but the relationship you have with that person.Ham_authority95 said:
You probably won't meet anyone else at the studio session apart from the engineer. After all, your band is booked there, so why would some other band be there unless the studio has multiple recording facilities that run simultaneously, or a band rehearsal space out the back? If you want to meet bands, at their gigs is the place to meet them.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to be like that guy who passes out business cards to everyone the second he meets them at a dinner party or whatever...BonsaiK said:
That terrible "Friday" video is floating around, made by those Ark Music Factory people, which got me thinking...how common is it that someone would get their start in the industry by doing something like that (going to a place that writes songs/makes videos and getting them to make you something, then showing it to other people)? I wouldn't think that method would work all that often...
Heh, I knew someone would ask me this soon.MisterGobbles said:
For every Rebecca Black there's thousands of others who got nowhere. That kind of "vanity" label that will record your stuff for a small fee is actually not a new thing, it's quite common and labels like that have been around for a long time. In the 1960s vanity labels would accept a small fee for a song you wrote, record your song as quickly/shabbily as possible with session musicians, and press you a 45 and about 20 or 30 copies for you to distribute to your friends so you could say you were a "recording artist". Nowadays they use YouTube and iTunes to do the same thing but the process is very similar, the key difference is that because the songs are publicly available there is a tiny chance you'll be discovered, as opposed to none at all. Blame the inadvertent promotional power of social media and Internet haters.
In Rebecca's case, she got lucky because the video was reposted on a well-known person's 'worst music ever' style blog, and the viral fame snowballed very quickly from there. It's resulted in millions of iTunes sales. Make no mistake - highlighting something because you think it really incredibly sucks is an extremely effective way to promote something commercially these days. Social media is very powerful and "going viral" doesn't mean everyone is going to hate it, because everyone likes different shit. Rebecca Black's video clocked up about 80,000 dislikes on YouTube last time I looked but it also clocked up about 12,000 likes - so there's your ratio of likers to haters right there, and it's the haters who got Rebecca Black in front of the likers. Whenever people post 'worst music ever' threads, or 'let's bash artist x for being so stupid' threads on The Escapist, those people never believe me when I tell them that they're actually promoting the artist, but they absolutely fucking are, and Rebecca Black is the proof - her fame has come directly from people who don't like her, promoting her stuff for free.
Yeah, I also figured someone would ask you at some point. And this also got me thinking...
I'm kinda involved in a parody rap/pop group that does songs that are outlandishly offensive and hilariously bad, both in production and songwriting (we pretty much are working with a laptop, Acoustica Mixcraft, a decent USB condenser mic, a Rock Band mic, and whatever is the best sound isolation we can get). We steal our beats from SoundClick, record whatever we wrote, usually with copious amounts of effects and bad autotune, and do other minimal editing. It's all for fun, not for profit, since we don't actually own any of the beats we use, and we've never SERIOUSLY considered making it into a profitable thing.
But is there actually a market for bad music, designed to be bad, and bought by the person with the knowledge that they are buying pure, unadulterated shit, possibly as a subset of the comedy market? Because we could easily work to raise our production values, buy a couple of the cheaper Soundclick beats, and start posting this crap up on Bandcamp or something.
I'm kinda involved in a parody rap/pop group that does songs that are outlandishly offensive and hilariously bad, both in production and songwriting (we pretty much are working with a laptop, Acoustica Mixcraft, a decent USB condenser mic, a Rock Band mic, and whatever is the best sound isolation we can get). We steal our beats from SoundClick, record whatever we wrote, usually with copious amounts of effects and bad autotune, and do other minimal editing. It's all for fun, not for profit, since we don't actually own any of the beats we use, and we've never SERIOUSLY considered making it into a profitable thing.
But is there actually a market for bad music, designed to be bad, and bought by the person with the knowledge that they are buying pure, unadulterated shit, possibly as a subset of the comedy market? Because we could easily work to raise our production values, buy a couple of the cheaper Soundclick beats, and start posting this crap up on Bandcamp or something.
Not really, but it depends where you're getting "bad" from.MisterGobbles said:
If you're doing something "bad", and you know it's bad, then you've just made a "joke", therefore you're squarely in the comedy realm. However, if you're going to tackle the comedy realm, just one joke alone isn't going to cut it, you'll have to work on ways to make your songs funny apart from the bad music/production, because that "oh look isn't this music terrible" joke is going to wear thin quickly on its own. Let's look at some popular comedy music:
Part of the joke is that the guy can't rap, but there's a lot of other humour going on too, most of which would be very obvious to everybody, but some of it is stuff that only somebody actually into rap music and aware of the typical forms and themes of the style would understand. So in other words, comedy has to have depth to it in order to maintain interest - the song is allowed to be bad, the comedy is not. If the comedy is also bad, then all you've done is created a comedy record that nobody wants to pay money for. Something has to be good about it for people to actually want it. In this case, it's possibly "bad music" but it's a "good parody", and it's the parody that people are buying it for.
Artists who are "unknowingly bad" on the other hand, are not trying to be bad, and in fact this "badness" is totally subjective anyway. People who buy "bad" music actually genuinely like it as much as the people who made the music genuinely believe in what they're doing. I don't buy music I hate, for example, but I bought the Die Antwoord album because there are songs on it that I genuinely like to listen to. I'm well aware that many people would consider that a "bad" record - so I know I'm buying "bad music", but the difference is that I don't actually agree with that assessment - if I did, I wouldn't have bought it. So to me, it's actually "good".
In summary, there has to be some kind of "value" that people are getting when they purchase something, or they just won't lay down the money. If that value is a tune then you've sold them music, there may be other factors involved, but they bought it for the music primarily. On the other hand if that value is laughter, then you've sold them comedy which just happens to have music attached. Or if that value is to leave it on their coffee table so it looks cool to their friends when they come over, then you've sold them a fashion accessory. In all these cases, the customer perceived that the product was "good" in some way, so they bought it.
You mentioned that people's minds are wired to like different music. It seems that most if not all people born in the past century or later seem to regard 4/4 as the "normal" time signature. Is there anything that makes people lean toward this even if they didn't become trained to hear it that way? If 'fate' had chosen differently, would most popular music be in something like 3/4 or something like that?
Go back a couple of hundred years and most popular dance music in European society was actually in 3/4, hence all those waltz pieces etc. Not sure why that changed, might have something to do with the appearance of drums in popular music where even numbers work better because of the primacy of the interplay between the snare and bass drum. Just a guess, but I reckon if the drum kit never eventuated we'd have more 3/4 music today.MisterGobbles said:
For some reason, good musician's brains tend to perceive everything rhythmic in multiples of 2, or 3. I don't know why this is, probably something to do with people not wanting to overload their head with complexity. Even when drummers play in 5/4, 7/4 or some other smartass time signature, their brain still breaks it down into smaller groups. Examples: the riff to Pink Floyd's "Money" is in 7/4 but a player will usually conceptualise it as a group of 3 and then a group of 4 (a multiple of 2), rather than 7 (a big prime number which doesn't split easily). The theme from Mission Impossible (the original, not the shitty recent remade version) is in 5/4 but when playing it your brain will tend to interpret as a group of 3 and then a group of 2. Without doing this, it won't "feel" right, even though what you're playing would still be technically correct. It's as if multiples of 2 and 3 are the natural limit of people's comfortable rhythm perception.
Why this is, is anybody's guess, but my theory is that people spend the first 9 months of their life hearing a very simple dum-DUM dum-DUM dum-DUM in their mother's womb so maybe that's the most important rhythmic training people get, and that then make's people's brains predispositioned toward simple rhythm. Modern dance music has if nothing else proved that you can throw pretty much ANY noise you want onto a track, and as long as there's also a steady beat there, people will accept it, and be able to dance to it/enjoy it, not in all cases but certainly in a lot of cases. Think about how that emulates the womb, where the beat is sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always constant, and there's also a myriad of other weird noises coming in and out... I think dance music and dance clubs are popular because it's about people getting back in touch with a very primal state of being deep in the formative part of the subsconscious... especially with the help of darkness, blinding lights and drugs, all designed to put you in that pure, pre-infant state... just a thought.