[Redcarmoose]

The process of discovery and appreciation of music may be different for each individual? Then again there will be parallels at times. We know the past musical history will direct interests in directions.

1) Take for example the vocalist. This individual may concentrate on the actual performance and think of sound quality as secondary. Imagine a rare recording found which may not be the best quality but would delineate those singing talents which helped propel the singer to notoriety!

2) The professional recording engineer will approach a recording and maybe value it’s ability to actually exist as an example of a musical event.

3) A rock guitarist may focus on the guitar and how the tone was captured.


And of course beyond the examples above your regular music buff is going to start and stop..........with maybe enjoying the whole picture.

Wait......what...the whole picture? The entire attributes of recorded music in general? How do I personally discover the value at hand?

It’s a really big question to say the least. But amazingly most of us here are into headphones for this single purpose. We are trying to get closer to the music. Much of this analysis is beyond a scientific strategy, as it’s intuitive and indescribable. Of course much of what goes on at Head-Fi is making a science and an art of indescribable aspects of music and music reproduction; and we move forward.

So because it’s an art it’s a subjective interpretation of someone’s communication or a group effort at musical transfer of creative elements. As talked about earlier it’s going to be better interpreted on many levels and slightly different for everyone. Then there is question of emotion. When the equipment falls away there is only the existing emotions of music to be felt. At times music is new, at times it’s a replay of older ideas and themes. Yet at the end it holds a specific value for what it does. Actually some is bad and some is good, some great. And we found as a group this stuff does normally get judged in parallel by the group.

As talked about earlier the group opinion IS able to define something as abstract and giant as a piece of music. How is this.

Also remember everyone has their own perception. Some music reviewers need multiple listens. Some pieces of music demand multiple listens to understand. Some music in underrated and some grossly overrated.

Then there are the musical groups. The cliques.....the listening experience/music that somehow becomes correct due to a past history.........only open to those that understand and lived that history.

As individuals we only have enough time to listen to a percent of music in the world. Somehow we actually work to slim down the variables. In these choices we choose what’s good as well as what’s a waist of time.

But what is it?

What is that thing that keeps the music moving along with a presentation which stays interesting and fun? We have all had those front loaded albums where the the first five songs are fantastic, then something happened; why is that?

Then there are the expectations. The single CD recording performance that just has to out-do the previous one. Literally the top that the next music that has to impossibly top. The fact that no human effort could top what came before, just because it was THAT good. Musical groups or even composers can attempt to move forward way ahead of a listeners expected place to a new musical place. The same can be when no innovations are obtained, being left with nothing new or creative brought to the table.

Then there is the recording ideas. The recording processes and goals wanted and obtained. How is it that there is no consistency in the recording process. I’ve heard the new producers just leave all the knobs the way they found them when they walked into the studio. With that all the CDs should sound the same? And while big budgets matter, it seems there is no correlation between recording budget and sound quality? There is no correlation between 1 year or 15 years between albums resulting in sound quality. If anything too long for a recording means we have 900 tracks making everything loose any spontaneity ever created.

So what is it when it all comes together for you? How is it when the planets line up on a piece of music? How do you judge a record. Is there actually a process or this all luck. What would you say outlines those recordings where the producer/artist/artists hit the nail on the head?

 

[ADUHF]

Thank you for that interesting question, Redcarmoose.

Hopefully, you won't be too disappointed with my answer. Because the short version is I just listen to whatever I like. Defining what that is is difficult, because everyone has different tastes, experiences, needs, wants, etc. when it comes to music, which undoubtedly influences their individual preferences.

Some probably also use music as a way of bonding with others culturally or socially. And I suppose I do that as well, to some degree. I think I tend to use it more as a way of exploring other cultures though, in lieu of actually travelling and sightseeing, since I haven't really made or found the time of $$ to do that personally. Music and music videos give me a little window into what people are doing, thinking, wearing, etc. in other parts of the world, which I probably wouldn't have an opportunity to experience otherwise.

I don't want to overstate the significance of that though. Because it's only one of many factors that probably influence my musical tastes and choices. What really gets me off musically are interesting rhythms, rhymes, vocal inflections, chord, key and modal progressions, melodies, arrangements of instruments or sounds, and like that...

The cultural aspects of the music are interesting and important as well. But they probably take a back seat to the more structural and formalistic aspects of the music in my case.

Some things will "click" with me though. While others simply don't. And I can't really explain why that happens alot of the time. So it isn't just about the novelty of a particular song, or arrangement, or performance that matters. There is somethin goin on on a more intuitive level as well that's a bit harder to quantify.

 

[ADUHF]

As far as recordings go, I like the good ones better than the bad ones. And would generally be more apt to listen to the former than the latter. A somewhat poorer recording or audio format would not really deter me from listening to or enjoying something though, if I really like what's goin on in the song or piece of music.

I do have some standards though when it comes to the quality of recordings and musical production. (I hope.) Though they may not be the highest on this particular forum. And it may not seem like it, based on some of the stuff that I post here at times.

 

[ADUHF]

So how do you judge music, Redcarmoose? And decide what to listen to and what not to listen to?

 

[baskingshark]

Nice post @Redcarmoose .

Personally for myself, I judge music in 2 settings:

1) Stage monitoring - I play the piano in a band for the last few years, and for purposes of stage monitoring, I go for technicals in music, and also how each instrument fits in the entire band dynamic. I value stuff like details, instrument separation, clarity, imaging and also teamwork, where each instrument has a defined role in the band and can shine at certain parts, but we shouldn't be crowding out or drowning out the other instruments when it is not your turn to do a solo riff or something. Music theory is important too for me in this setting, I get happy hearing some unorthodox music arrangements, unexpected chord progressions or jazz improvs. Stuff like substitution chords and extension chords.

Sad to say, I have realized after helping with some recordings, that a lot of recorded material and CDs/MTVs are all enhanced post recording. Lots of work goes in the studio after a few takes of recordings, so even someone that doesn't sing or play well during a recording can be made to sound perfect post production. In fact a lot of modern day singers can't hit the same notes they sing in CD recordings sometimes, and it is a computer enhanced voice helping in the recording, that can even allow someone to hit some notes way above their normal vocal range. When you hear them sing live such as in concerts, it isn't as great.

A lot of computer work also goes on for instruments nowadays. In fact for some EDM/techno music, I've seen bandmates just press a button on a laptop, and the entire drum loop and riff is played from the laptop perfectly during a concert/recording. Maybe I'm kind of a technological dinosaur, but I've yearned for the days of maybe 15 - 20 years back where there wasn't such computer enhanced stuff in music, and what someone sang or played was what was recorded. I'm still learning to embrace technology in music, I think it is the future, and it can bring benefits to the table for sure.


2) Casual music listening at home - I go for timbre and tonality, not so much for technicalities. More to chill, sit back and relax and just enjoy the music, rather than dissecting every technical aspect and looking at the music with a microscope.

 

[Whitigir]

Perfectly answered as above .... surprisingly with digital recording and synthetic plays....modern recording sucked big time when compared to back then and analog recording where people couldn’t mess up

the only answer I have is that back then, they were moved by enthusiasm and nowadays, anything that can sell fast and for quick bucks

Since the come back of high resolution music, some enthusiasms are coming back but the prime or golden period was back then in the past...lol

 

[Whazzzup]

It’s all about that bass

 

[Whitigir]

It’s all about that bass

Roflmao, that was a good One

 

[Redcarmoose]

So how do you judge music, Redcarmoose? And decide what to listen to and what not to listen to?

I was planning on posting.

Well I have come to realize that some listening is simply research. That music we find may only hold value to learn from on the road something else of true value. So the music is only a curiosity and will hold value as just something to find out about.

Along with that the “values” can be changing at times. Stuff we liked before then can get placed in a different area of importance, probably due to new ideas of what’s good. At times recordings are not as well made at first thought. So as we know some music has an ability to be timeless and other music is somehow momentary. There is also the pushing forward of elements. I wrote about this is the first post. When we hear music from an established performer or group, there needs to be some style of innovation. This may be why fist time listeners are better entertained while experienced (with the artist) listeners are maybe not so smitten with the piece. The first time listener has no background as can be sincerely enthralled by even a lackluster performance if it contains special aspects. This same phenomenon can be applied to whole genres where some groups take the genre to another level or add a new innovative element.

The mirror of this concept has to do with the flow of time and the experience of the listener. Thus I value music purely on sentiment due to the time and place and era I heard it. So this value quality has a time line. This same time line can even be public as the public experiences new innovation in an artist or popular style which has been introduced iconic to the times. Obviously talent is involved and maybe things we can’t put a finger on; like the coming together of technology and style.

Obviously sound (quality) would be one of the ways I judge music. But even that is starting to change a little. There was a looking for dynamics which seemed to be from non-bricked-walled masters and non loudness war old pressings. Now I actually gravitate to loud modern recordings.


To mix the above self-theory; it is this additive of vibrant sound quality along with something I can’t actually put into words. I guess I would call it musical attention justification. Literally the ability of the recording to hold interest.

How this interest takes place maybe was in the past the ability of the musicians to display talent, but there is still that mesmerizing factor that comes from just the sound of the instruments. The quality could be the instrument sparkling in beauty like a jewel or diamond. A transfixed illustration of life at its best and being alive most beautiful.

So I do look at these single tone characters. It is the single beautiful aspect of one instrument played and recorded well. Yet again it’s the song writing and arraignment as the spectacular single tone as special as it is will eventually wear out it’s novelty.

So with the song writing and performance it also may be this art quality which is hard to write about. The beautiful aspect can be just the transfer of emotion by the ability to sing in a special iconic voice, put together with a mood. Of course there are many moods. But I want to music to be powerful enough to direct my mood. I value it if it can take hold of my emotion. I don’t simply want to play a piece of music for my emotion, the music should be transporting in that regard. Now within being cast into that transfixed place should also be slight filigree of optimal musical mastery. I mean that’s when your most vulnerable to accept this transfer of talent, when your emotions and soul are open and willing to feel. When that transfer takes place then it’s safe to say it’s this transcendence that makes the music epic. Again though.......I don’t know why that quality can get stale.

But for me I value those recordings that are able to move me in that way. At times I’m pretty sure it’s technology which is adding to the closeness at hand. I’m actually at the thought of newer modern recordings being better. I actually believe that the recording science is getting better. But also our time in life will maybe have a personality that’s common in many recordings. Same as if you go back to mid 1960s Capital Records vinyl recordings they represent a time and place. And the above post about recording purity reminded me of direct to disc recordings where they place a couple microphones in a room and record a jazz group in one take, holding the room acoustic properties in place and holding an imaginary placement of the actual musicians on playback. I actually am less concerned with that and want overproduction in the studio. I value recordings where production raised the music to a better place even at the risk of making the music sound unreal.

I still think emotion and soul can be found in something heavily processed, as I’m more about the musical experience in whole. As mentioned above musicianship plays a key role of course above recording quality, but it’s when it all comes together that it’s special; when the recordings capture the musicianship perfect and enhance the beautiful aspect of the performance. We all remember how technology made good musicians better, like George Martin and his extrapolation of the Beatles creativity...... I’m OK with producers continuing with those first ideas.

Because I’m primarily focused on rock and metal the drumming is key. I actually don’t think the general public understands the backbone of drumming in rock and metal. If it’s acoustic drums they need to be captured in a studio that really knows how. Drums are by far the hardest instrument to capture. Drums take the most microphones, take the most recording skill and demand the correct balance in the music. So in many ways I’ve become a fan of drums on recordings. If the drums are good I’m ok, though if the drumming is fantastic I’m spellbound. I always worry most when a band loses it’s drummer. It’s critical for a band to have special talent in that single area. This is why in the recording process for Metal, they record the drum tracks first.

 

[BrownBear]

I definitely listen to what I like, lol, to echo a previous poster. However this is something that has always intrigued me. What makes a song, or piece of music come together to be pleasing to ones ears. I understand tones and melody and harmony, but to put them all together to create one piece that is good is, sometimes, magic.

I think it's luck, what you mentioned in your OP. To appeal to any given person must mean that something in the music, be it production, melody, harmony, etc, strikes them. However I don't think that it's possible to identify what exactly it is. I can tell you I love the sound of a perfect fourth, so naturally I'm drawn to music that perhaps closes with a plagal cadence, but that's only one tiny aspect in the grand scheme.

I don't think I've answered your question at all lol. But I will say I did try.

 

[megabigeye]

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The following is my opinion and my opinion alone. These opinions were formed by listening, self reflection, and a very small amount of reading. They are not "well informed" opinions and are possibly (probably?) technically wrong. There are probably people out there that think but Neil Peart is a GOD! and then punch their screens when they read my opinion. I don't mean to offend or annoy anybody. I just want to express my opinion. You're free to disagree with me, but please do so tactfully and allow me to disagree with you in return.


This is an interesting and tough question to answer. There used to be a record store in town where the owner and sole employee was renowned for knowing all the music in her shop, so I went looking for recommendations. When she asked me what I liked, all I could come up with was essentially, "I like music with a certain je ne sais quois." I blushed and felt like a dolt, but I really didn't know how to express what I like. Like pornography, I know it when I see it. I think I eventually told her that I like drums.

I guess I simultaneously agree and disagree with a lot that has been said above, it all depends on the music.
I don't have much musical training, so I can't always tell whether or not a piece of music is theoretically interesting, whether the chord progressions are unusual or common, what the time signature is, whether or not the drummer has "chops," or if the guitarist is a virtuoso or merely getting by. I kind of wish I understood that stuff, but on the other hand I don't really care too much. Not to say that I can never tell those things, but not reliably. For instance, Jimi Hendrix is an artist I like, but I'm rarely wowed by his ability even though people think he's one of the best guitarists ever. Same for John Bonham.

In fact, I often think that technical proficiency is way over-rated in music. Neil Peart? Technically proficient, I guess, but it just sounds silly to me, like a little boy showing off. Those sorts of drum solos actually make me laugh. Carlos Santana or Eric Clapton? Both allegedly virtuosos at guitar, but I hate (hate, hate, HATE) both of them. Like, I'd love to punch Clapton in the throat.
On the other hand, Jaki Liebezeit was technically stunning and his style and music is transporting and transfixing. Brian Chippendale? I have no idea how good he is technically, but (to quote Maestro de Souza) he plays with the blood. And there's some music that I think virtuosity could only make worse. I mean, what makes punk rock punk is that you don't have to be an expert, in fact you hardly have to know how to play at all. "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band."
The same goes for music production, recording quality, etc. Some music is, obviously, made worse with bad recording, with jazz as an example. I love Mingus, but some of his recordings are so bad that it's hard to want to listen to them. On the flip side, though, some music definitely should not be "well recorded" or highly produced. Lightning Bolt's early stuff was totally rough around the edges, and that's part of what makes the music so exciting and adrenaline pumping. Their later albums are "better" produced, but a lot of that energy is lost.
I think it was e e cummings that wanted to write in the "American idiom," and likewise I think a recording should match the idiom of the music it's trying to capture. A punk rock album with a polished sound is no longer punk rock.

I kind of agree that music should show some progression within a genre and exhibit some personal flavor and interpretation. If we didn't have that, all music would be sad and sound essentially the same, everything would be derivative of something else. Greta Van Fleet and Interpol are artists I'd accuse of being entirely derivative (at least the stuff I've heard). Led Zeppelin and Joy Division, on the other hand, took (or, um, stole) what other's were doing, made it unmistakably their own, and in so doing made it better. (Yes, yes. I realize there's an argument to be made that Zep mostly just ripped off and didn't do much changing at all. But good artists copy, great artists steal, right?)
On the other hand, though, part of what makes some music what it is is that there's not that much variation between artists (or at least not much that I can detect). Some music often sounds more like a cultural phenomenon rather than personal expression: pop, Cape Verdean music, blues, etc. Yeah, there are standouts in each genre, but it's the sameness that connects it with its culture.

For a while now I've been wondering why music? Like, what is it exactly? How does it do what it does? And why? Why does it do those things? Why does it exist at all? One of the most personally pleasing answers that I've seen is that it's mostly just a happy coincidence particular to humans: our ability to detect patterns, nicely juxtaposed to an ability to perceive the passage of time. I can't for the life of me remember where I read that, though. But if that's the case, why have we stuck with it for so long? I mean, it's one of (if not the) oldest forms of art, thousands upon thousands of years old. If it were really just a coincidence, you'd think we'd have abandoned it a long time ago. So, what is it and why?
My personal (and simple) answer is that it's a form of communication for things that can't be communicated clearly through words or visually. Memories, emotions, cultural identities, personal identities. It's a way of connecting ourselves with others as well as connecting with ourselves— our past selves, our current selves, and our future selves.
Of course, with communication comes the ability to lie and deceive, and I think there's plenty of music that lies. Pop, I think, is probably the most egregious offender in this regard. I often consider pop to be disingenuous at best and cynical at worst, distilling and exploiting other people's emotions and experiences for popularity and monetary gain. Patti Smith to me sounds like a bit of a faker, and Eric Clapton's "blues" sounds like outright fraud.
PJ Harvey conveys an emotional grit that I just don't get from Patti Smith. Paul Geremia may just be another white guy singin' the blues, but his music, to me, conveys a sense of having lived the life. And Björk is able to distill her emotions in a way that makes them all the more intense, rather than watered down.

This is the one metric by which I measure music: its ability to honestly communicate and to connect me to myself and the world around me. But it's not something I can easily tell a shopkeeper when I want a recommendation.

 

[Redcarmoose]

I made a lasting attempt at liking Arnold Schoenberg, but to no success? Though the other serial composers were somehow slightly more accessible? Is Chopin just simple (simpler to understand) and easy listeningt? Yes!

Or is some music truly some kind of snooty club where only schooled listeners get to enjoy the music? Or....better yet, is it just an acquired taste like learning to enjoy blue cheese? The most elitist statement I ever heard was “what do you mean” that’s easy!

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt.......what happens when we don’t relate with intellectual music? Is it the same as modern art at times.........due to not reflecting regular classical illustration of humans and the world? We relate to music due to maybe very early foundations. I can remember Johnny Rivers playing guitar on Secret Agent Man from an AM radio when I was 4 years old? Is Johnny Rivers closer to stupid people music because children can relate to it? Maybe so! They say Beethoven was just as rebellious/revolutionary for his time and he ends up the most beloved and listened to composer in Western Music. Beethoven is accessible yet renowned as pure genius.

Today was a special event listening and wondering if it’s simply the tone of instruments or musical writing and performance which makes people fall in love with a piece of recorded music? After careful contemplation, I’m betting it’s all three combined. Though the X factor here is subjectivity. How wonderful the world of subjective thought. Yet subjectivity becomes a living hell if your spouse takes you to a concert having music you hate.

I worked in a record store in my late twenties and found what was then a giant sub-culture based on classic rock. Yet inside of the classic recorded arrangements there was still a level of grand controversy! David Axelrod (musician) and his experiments standing in for the then broken-up The Electric Prunes ended as an imaginative farce on what pop-rock could be!

• Mass in F Minor
• Release of an Oath

Mass in F Minor was probably way different than any stoned out kid at the time was expecting. If Strawberry Alarmclock’s Incense and Peppermints was the apex of psychedelic rock then surly Mass in F Minor was both the death and funeral of the genre; let alone the final-end of the 1960s flower-power movement. If kids were experiencing a life transformation during Iron Butterfly’s playback of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida then maybe music actually did change people? ......OK...I know it was more than just music.

The truth is music has always changed people. We can only imagine what happens to an individual while hearing something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor. This piece was written by Bach for the opening of a Cathedral in Dresden, yet wasn’t used. If you grew up as a Protestant church member (or are one now) then you know how much music is part of Christian spirituality. Apart from Western Christian Services music ends as a central role in pretty much any spiritual endeavor taken on by mankind anywhere on earth. IMO

So what is it? Is it mood as people are walking in to a church service and music is playing. It’s 30 minutes as the church doors are open and people filing in and getting seated. What happens when the music stops? The music stops but the effects are still in place. So we can witness the influence of Classical Music on many aspects of modern music. So you have to wonder if (old classics) make modern pop music more accessible and ultimately popular? We know rock was a mixture of Jazz, Rhythm and Blues. Rock-n-Roll was also derived from Gospel Music. Yet even if you never heard real Gospel you would understand it somewhat by listening to Motown. There is definitely church organ in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida_(album) even if it’s not widely admitted to. Of course church style organ in Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple too! Yet on the surface these influences are not always noted. The question is would rock music church style organ mean more to a listener who had a long history hearing church music? I would take a gamble at saying yes.

But our musical tastes change and evolve. So much of it is having hand holds for perspective and innovation for entertainment and snobbery. We have all witnessed the genre knuckle draggers who have taken it as their cause to keep the genre alive by reintroduction of very few new ideas. This near plagiarism always gets judged with less respect, like maybe something cheaper and worth less? Yet for all the less-than-brilliant performances these bottom-feeders still get an hourly wage for reproduction and creation of modern music.

Somehow we have a meter on which performers and writers are real and which are concocted corporate money making inventions; at least we think we do. Years before the internet changed the modern music retail paradigm, the retail avenues were already divergent into two areas. One was the big name labels and one was underground labels. This still goes on today to a level. There was enough room in the market for both.

Underground record stores offered super cheap used CDs and LPs from the past as well as non-corporate music releases. Obviously these were the up-and-comers (like Green Day) and after a brief run-in with popularity they were then picked-up by the major labels. Then of course there was the bands that would never make it, that maybe didn’t want to make it. The strange and lost world of music which was just not mainstream enough to really matter. Also this purgatory held both music too smart for the masses and too stupid. As always it was the stupid music that was the most fun. These style of retail establishments needed to be on the edge, catering to a college town and always changing inventory.

What does all this have to do with the OPs (My) question really? It has to do with exposure to music. It has to do with the existence of recorded music. At times a used record store serves a purpose of having personal who pride themselves on musical knowledge. The worker’s other classmates normally went on and earned a college degree, yet these record store music slinger-types focused on music and their love of it. Some workers were actually secret vinyl collectors who were paying a penny for rare Jazz 33.1/3s. Some were high school drop outs with their own rock band just on the verge of fame, so they thought. Some had an encyclopedic mental data-base of multi-musical genres and simply enjoyed showing how smart they were to the public. Others were actually anti-social which somehow seemed to work well in this edgy style of environment. But.....most of all they needed to be cool to sell records to college kids. The stuffy Jazz vinyl store down the street refused to sell CDs but in the rock underground everything was music. Was the Jazz store experts cool? Maybe? The Classic Rock record store was cool, but only in that aloof Pink Floyd kind of way. The underground rock store had drunks and it was even a dangerous place to be late at night. At times people needed to be thrown out, but that was the charm. You could eat food in the store and the music was always at a multitude of different volumes. Due to the minimal wage the employees were making, music volume levels were one thing they had control of.

Yet it turns out the 10 cent records were the coolest. Records can be like trash where they are still music yet unwanted and not of value to society at large. Old trends need to make way for new trends to make way for even newer trends and so on. But to someone who wasn’t around in 1955 old records can offer a cheap vacation from reality.....being a mood switch and exotic unknown landscape world. There is always a handful of questions. What were these people like listening to this old music? What has this old music done to change today’s music? Is this album really worth anything at all? Is this music really trash or solid gold? Maybe somewhere in the middle where a couple songs are good?

And finally:

Who thought this music was actually worth recording and putting out into the world for entertainment? What were they thinking? Why? Still we have a wealth of music at our disposal. Just think farther back in history people had maybe less music? That of course is if you believe that our present world music library is compounded from generations of music. We are also one of the first generations to enjoy three generations (or more) of recorded music. Never has there been such choice. The only thing we can’t do is hear music of the future, yet we have more than enough music from the past. What would Bach think if he heard the Beatles play?

 

[gimmeheadroom]

In fact a lot of modern day singers can't hit the same notes they sing in CD recordings sometimes, and it is a computer enhanced voice helping in the recording, that can even allow someone to hit some notes way above their normal vocal range. When you hear them sing live such as in concerts, it isn't as great.

I can't really participate in this thread, it would definitely lead to TL;DR

But this thing you mentioned has been obvious to me every since I was old enough to buy record albums. A lot of my friends loved live concerts but I couldn't stand most of the recordings because a lot of the technical aspects were wrong and a lot of times it was obvious the singers couldn't hear themselves during the gig. Even though they had good energy you only get in front of thousands of screaming fans.

I was going over some Chaka Kahn albums a few months ago and I found some live concerts. I didn't expect them to be great. To me one of the things that shows you somebody really can sing or play and has a good monitoring setup is when you hear a live album and they really nail it. She is definitely an amazing singer, perfect pitch and just hits everything.

 

[FastAndClean]

you feel it or not

 

[Redcarmoose]

How can we in general rely on others to judge music?

If you’ve ever read a music review and gone along with the opinions, or even been remotely influenced by them, someone’s else’s opinion became important.

So how does the interpretation of music reviews work?

The first aspect is trust.

It’s like getting to know a person.

The first review you read of a piece of music is approached with suspicious eyes. Reviewers ultimately need to try and be objective and critical. The risk is letting them have full control over your ability to choose music. And with something so subjective it’s actually a challenge. In fact many reviews can get re-evaluation and scores adjusted due to the simple fact that subjectivity plays such an important role. The critics hated Led Zeppelin when they debuted. In this regard reviews can only be believed after group consensus turns out to be mutual and realistic. But even with-in such close parameters there is still room for personal values to remain as an opinion. Such is the ultimate subjectivity of music.

Basically in the end it doesn’t really matter what the critics have to say? Maybe? But? They are simply writers and listeners who have a printed say on how they feel. With-in the musical rock sub-genre of Heavy-Metal.......humans produced around 500 albums which came out in 1990.....in direct contrast to 5000 newly recorded albums released from January 2020 until August 2020! Just think!

With such a plethora of releases music critics now gain importance....maybe? Not only that but music labels now serve a different purpose. Up until recent times a recording studio was needed to record music. Even a producer was needed to guide and create a sound for a band. Now the recording has been simplified and costs greatly reduced. Anyone with a desire can make a record. Labels can but are now not needed to pay for studio time. The increase in electronics in pop music has relieved the popular music genre of even needing live musicians at all. In the 1970s and 1980s studio recordings in New York were performed by session musician bass players. Most played Fender bass guitars as the producers knew the sound and accepted the Fender tone as correct and better than the other choices. Walking in with a Fender bass meant the producer knew the sound and how to place it in the recording. The bass players wanted their perception of themselves to fit a group of well understood dynamics.

Now synthesis of bass tracks with machines has put many of the New York session bass players out of business; they simply are not needed in modern sub-genes of popular music. The drum machine has gained wide range acceptance and respect. Lost is some of the novelty of synthesizer sounds, and added is a day to day utility in use.

Thus reviewed albums and listened to albums are met with more open values. The question now becomes almost artistic. We now listen if a piece of music seems to convey emotion. The single greatest loss of emotional aspects today though comes from the click track.


The Click:

If anyone takes and tries to judge the music of the 1960s and 1970s one major change has occurred. Music today is uniformity in time. Any song by Jimi Hendrix has a range of time signatures. It’s generally accepted that if Jimi Hendrix recorded in a modern studio today his music (if recorded to a click) would sound inferior. So just how can this be? Hendrix has been copied by countless guitar players yet the one most important thing is not copied. That as just shown is use of various times signatures. Confusing as it may seem producers today can take a click track section and move it forward or back or copy and past the sections of songs to their creative choice in expression. Yet it’s this soul which seems to be missing so much. It’s even added to live music reproduction. Are we left with the improvements or drawbacks of such a tool?

Today many aspects of the music recording industry are met with suspicion by audiophiles. Yet if you look back it seems digital recording has been greatly streamlined and improved beyond imagination. Surely recorded music should be actually better now than it has ever been through-out history of sound recording? Is it?


Disputes are large and will take up whole threads of opinions. My personal opinion is that everything is a tool. How that tool works and is utilized is the question. We have all seen and heard routinely made great modern recording examples and all heard classic-old-recordings. Obviously a work like TDSotM is a timeless blend and catalyst of both artistic expression and recording technology.


As music listeners there has never been a better time. Basically all the technology that has ever existed before is available if someone has the time and effort to put forth. Did you want reel-to-reel playback? A copy of reel-to-reel 24/96 playback? Did you want Hi-res or vinyl playback? Is 16 bit-44.1 kHz playback enough? Or is 320 kbps MP3 fine? It matters more to some we are aware of that.

Today choices are more than ever. If you can get your head around the fact that no generation in history has had such a choice in music. The 1950s had the choice of 1930-1940s records. The 1950s had new stereo recording processing that is still in use today. It’s safe to say multiple track recording was starting to be perfected in the 1960s and 1970s. But in 2020 people have access to most all the music that has ever been recorded. But if someone has 4000 songs then is the quality going to be judged the same is if they had only 40 songs?

As listeners we all remember how having just a few albums meant the learning curve was way way different. We became more focused on a piece of music that was maybe not our cup of tea, after 20 listens. Because we had twenty records we simply needed to hear new music and may search outside our comfortability zone. The necessity being the mother of invention meant we invented new musical sub-genres of affection due to our simple need of new music. We have all gone to concerts with friends only to be a new fan of the band afterwards surprisingly enough.

So how do you objectively review music. Is it simply based on well known principles of talent and recording processes? Is it just more new and never heard before sounds? Is it simply the imagination of the recording producers to bring us a new unexpected sonic landscape like TDSotM?