[Zapp_Fan]

1) I was raised in a household that (well, it was my dad) that had no respect for Elvis and considered him a degenerate thief of better musicians' work and credit. It's a strong opinion but it reflects the fact that he really was not nearly as innovative as some think.

2) I came across this at random today, turns out metal and classical do have a lot of intersection. This guy writes legit symphonies for metal instrumentation. http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-untamedsymphonies?song=1 ... his guitar chops are certainly not bad, I'll leave it to you to render an opinion on his composition.

 

[SilverEars]

1) I was raised in a household that (well, it was my dad) that had no respect for Elvis and considered him a degenerate thief of better musicians' work and credit. It's a strong opinion but it reflects the fact that he really was not nearly as innovative as some think.

2) I came across this at random today, turns out metal and classical do have a lot of intersection. This guy writes legit symphonies for metal instrumentation. http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-untamedsymphonies?song=1 ... his guitar chops are certainly not bad, I'll leave it to you to render an opinion on his composition.

I don't know if you can call performers thieves. You have music producers, writers, musicians that work with singers. It's all about how well the performer does their role. Elvis rose due to full-filling his role. When I look at him perform, I see a stage performer. Wasn't he censored for his dance as well? I guess people in the US were quite conservative, and saw his expression as a threat to culture. It's funny when you look back now. Same can be said about actors/actresses.

Did the writers and composers get credit for their roles? If he effected them from getting their credit, yeah, I'd call him a thief.

I wonder if there were influences to him to perform live like that at a period when the media were so conservative? Was it the music scene he was hanging around at the time?

 

[SilverEars]

Didn't he get flack for this performance on national TV?

 

[bigshot]

1) I was raised in a household that (well, it was my dad) that had no respect for Elvis and considered him a degenerate thief of better musicians' work and credit. It's a strong opinion but it reflects the fact that he really was not nearly as innovative as some think.

The easiest way to find out if that is true is to listen to versions of Elvis's early songs that came before Elvis and see how similar they are to Elvis's version. You can quickly see what Elvis added to the mix that way. For instance...

Big Mama Thornton 1952
Elvis 1954

Bill Monroe 1946
Elvis 1954

Arthur Crudup 1946
Elvis 1954

All of these Elvis versions came out in a very short period of time in 1954. It's pretty clear that Elvis wasn't stealing... he was synthesizing them into something completely his and completely new. Elvis took blues and jump blues and merged it with old time country music, then amped up the energy and rock n roll was born. To me, that is a very big thing. I would say that Elvis was tremendously innovative and he never "stole" anything from his influences. He used them the way all artists should use influences- as a catalyst to create something new and different.

I would say that if you wanted to list the most original and influential musical performers of the 20th century, it would be Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. All of them changed the world of music forever. And all of them were feared by the status quo when they first hit it big.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Well, I myself was never a hard-line anti-elvis-er, but I do think his influence on the actual creation of rock is dramatically overrated. Some people see him as the very root and original founder of the genre, which is what I mean by overrated. I don't think he's an outright thief personally.

Sure, he popularized rock n roll with mainstream audiences, no argument. But Chuck Berry and others did as much and arguably more to define the genre / sound. It's hard to discuss Elvis' merits without getting into the racial politics of the 50s, which I'm just going to go head and declare out of scope for a science thread, that's history class...

 

[Strangelove424]

Didn't he get flack for this performance on national TV?

Yes, too much swagger, dancing ability, and crotch insinuation for the public to handle at the time. And if the real King of Rock'n'Roll showed up as a black man well... they'd have gone running for the hills...

 

[Whazzzup]

Inspiration was found all over the world.

 

[bigshot]

Well, I myself was never a hard-line anti-elvis-er, but I do think his influence on the actual creation of rock is dramatically overrated.

Rock and Rock and Roll are two completely different things. Rock was crystalized and popularized by the Beatles. Just listen to what the hits were in 1962 and 1963 and compare them to what pop music sounded like a few years later. Elvis did the same thing for Rock n Roll. He took something that was a little part of jump blues and turned it into something entirely new. The introduction of country influence was what started the wave of rockabilly that swept the pop charts for years. Rock n Roll wouldn't have existed without him.

It's good to recognize the roots of things, but my point is that you have to look at the innovations and the outcome, not just the raw ingredients. The greatest performers were catalysts. They didn't invent new things out of whole cloth. They combined yellow and blue and came up with green. In the history of modern popular music, the most interesting things came from a junction of quite different things. With jazz it was the way that ragtime, military band music like Sousa marches and tin pan alley intersected. With pop vocals, it was the way the microphone changed the way singers sang combined with big band swing and the omnipresent blues and jazz. With rock n roll, it was jump blues, country music and crooning. The elements of all of the crossed over, but the result was different. It's like that old commercial... "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" (or peanut butter and nanner samiches for Elvis!)

 

[bigshot]

Inspiration was found all over the world.

I love it when foreigners do their own version of American! Here is what they are looking at...

 

[RRod]

Any of youz guyz use stereo-to-surround processing for regular listening (even for 'good' stereo material)?

 

[bigshot]

Yes, I use the Yamaha Stereo to 7.1 DSP most of the time

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Rock and Rock and Roll are two completely different things. Rock was crystalized and popularized by the Beatles. Just listen to what the hits were in 1962 and 1963 and compare them to what pop music sounded like a few years later. Elvis did the same thing for Rock n Roll. He took something that was a little part of jump blues and turned it into something entirely new.

My point is that his influence is almost always overstated because his contemporaries are basically left out of the discussion. You can't talk Rock n Roll without talking about Chuck Berry, who is often argued to have done more to form the rockabilly style, but people still manage to omit him from the discussion all the time. I do think Elvis deserves credit for shaping the trend, but not all of it.

 

[RRod]

Yes, I use the Yamaha Stereo to 7.1 DSP most of the time

The 7ch stereo mode or something like Neo:6?

 

[bigshot]

Sort of, but not really. The Dolby Pro Logic and DTS Neo:6 have certain aspects that can make stereo music sound better on 5.1 systems, but that isn't their primary purpose. They are primarily intended to decode matrixed surround that is encoded into a stereo track. When you play a Pro Logic encoded TV show through a Pro Logic decoder, it gives you a separate center channel and a rear surround ambience channel. If the track isn't encoded for Pro Logic, it just kind of splits things up randomly. My Yamaha DSP is specifically designed to split regular stereo music to a room filling sound. It's always hard to know what a DSP is actually doing, because it is rarely documented in the manual, but from what I've been able to figure out, the Yamaha DSP takes all of the signal that is common between the left and right and channels it to the center channel. Then it takes out of phase material and channels that to the rears, along with some of the hard left and hard right panned content to give the left and right rear some separation. It's also doing something in the time domain that I can't quite figure out, but it makes the soundstage larger and fills the room immersively- it feels like a larger space. I think most AVRs come with an equivalent, but Yamaha is probably the best at designing DSPs. Some of them are adjustable too. The Stereo to 7.1 DSP has level adjustment of fronts to rears. Other ones have various types of depth adjustments. My AVR has a ton of DSPs... many of them totally baffle me!

My point is that his influence is almost always overstated because his contemporaries are basically left out of the discussion. You can't talk Rock n Roll without talking about Chuck Berry, who is often argued to have done more to form the rockabilly style, but people still manage to omit him from the discussion all the time. I do think Elvis deserves credit for shaping the trend, but not all of it.

Now that you mention it, I think it could be argued that Roy Orbison did most of the things the Beatles did before the Beatles too.

 

[Whazzzup]

My experience is Yamaha 5.1 systems really throws the sound around, really liked it. The only reason I went with Bose is that Yamaha had capatability issues with ps3/ps4, Granted I don’t play that many blue rays....