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playing/writing out of key
 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-14 09:55 [#02534033]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker



when you play a chord or a note that is out of key do you
follow any theory or do you play it because it sounds
good/it works to you? is there a theory behind why it works?
the one i know is the circle of fifths, modulating to
another key will be easier or harsher depending on how close
or how far it is to the current key you are in.


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2017-10-14 12:17 [#02534039]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



i do everything by ear, no theory


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-15 01:48 [#02534075]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



when you play a chord or a note that is out of key do you
follow any theory or do you play it because it sounds
good/it works to you?


yes.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 08:47 [#02534082]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534075



witch one yes witch one


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2017-10-15 13:43 [#02534093]
Points: 24571 Status: Regular



What do you mean by out of key? Do you mean it isn't
diatonic??


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-15 14:07 [#02534094]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to mermaidman: #02534082



thank-you for falling into my nerd joke trap. i was
employing inclusive-or, and so i meant yes to both.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 15:56 [#02534095]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to marlowe: #02534093



it is diatonic for example you are in g minor but you play a
chord in d minor then either stay in d minor or go back to g
minor


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 16:08 [#02534097]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534094



is the theory you apply anything you can describe?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-15 16:20 [#02534105]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to mermaidman: #02534097



yes.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 16:44 [#02534107]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534105



then please do


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-15 18:03 [#02534109]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



after setting my tracker to 175bpm, i'll start off by
opening the folder full of jum roops tussle tossed me called
"noicejunglebruv" and scrub around until something grabs my
fancy.

i'll drop 1, 2, or 4 instances of C-4 in track 1 and let the
pattern loop. most of the rum koops aren't precisely 175bpm,
and it won't loop seamlessly. i open up the instrument
editor and use note up/down to coarsely adjust the sample.

next, i fuss with "fine tune" for ages. depending on my
mood, sometimes i like the um oops to run over themselves;
start of a loop cuts off the prevother times, i like an
ever-so-slight pause after the loop; the whole thing being a
tad faster than 175bpm.

once i'm statisfied with that, i generally repeat the
process; find a complimentary loop for track 2, fine tune it
until sass. at this point, i may already hearing pitches out
of this jungoloop.

drums have a tuning to them, and given that these are loops
someone else made by chopping up another someone else's
funky drumming, we are already quite divorced from 440hz
even temporal whatever.

once the rhythm sounds good, i more or less explode whatever
pitches i'm hearing into something more explicit.

then i load up some 303 sounds. i don't bother tuning them.

then some rave stabs, which are all flithy out of tune
anyways, more portamento, some other drum loops...

then start using portamento to scratch all the drum loops.
oh no! everything's out of tune! i have to spend ages
weaving a tapestry of portamento hex codes so all the other
things going on warp in a way that sounds in-tune to my ear

so, more or less, it's what sounds good (which is probably
the chords and scales we all know, with a heavy preference
for phyrgian and more fun scales) but working with live
samples has me warping pitches all over the map and i wind
up with these strange-tasting chords made from part of a
mangled loop, a rave stab, and a bent 303 and they're...
melty tears, the sickness, i dunno


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 18:12 [#02534114]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534109



thanks. do you use a hardware sampler or?


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 18:35 [#02534115]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker



oh sorry u use the tracker


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2017-10-15 18:37 [#02534116]
Points: 24571 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534095



Do you mean you play a D minor chord or a chord diatonic to
the key of D minor?


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 18:38 [#02534118]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to marlowe: #02534116



diatonic to the key of d minor


 

offline RussellDust on 2017-10-15 20:12 [#02534125]
Points: 15925 Status: Lurker



What feels good is a good chord, the way I understand it,
unless you put the intention into making a “bad chord”
for a specific reason, to manipulate a listener into feeling
awkward for example; a process which can get a bit
obvious/cliché.


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2017-10-15 20:23 [#02534126]
Points: 24571 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534118



Well D minor and G minor are only one flat apart, so you
won't have strayed too far away from the first key :P


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 20:26 [#02534127]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to RussellDust: #02534125



yes there is a whole grey area between the good chord and
the bad chord though. but it is about how it feels/works in
the end i guess.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-15 20:30 [#02534128]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to marlowe: #02534126



yeah i know :) it will be an unnoticeable change


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2017-10-15 23:16 [#02534130]
Points: 24571 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534128



It'd be quite subtle, eg. you can use a C major chord which
occurs in both keys (using the raised 6th in G minor) as a
nice bridge between them :)


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-16 09:57 [#02534135]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to marlowe: #02534130



thanks marlowe i don’t know any of this by memory but i
use the circle of fifths chart and an app that has every
chord with every voicing it shows which chords belong to
which key i find it very useful it’s called chordpolypad
if anyone is interested


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2017-10-16 13:26 [#02534140]
Points: 24571 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534135



Nice - I'm a piano teacher so if you've any questions please
feel free to ask :]


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-16 15:15 [#02534141]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to marlowe: #02534140



thank you very much marlowe! it's great that we have a piano
teacher in xltronic i think.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 16:48 [#02534148]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



tension and release: music is all about tension and release.
you want some sour chords so the good ones feel nicer.
sometimes it's fun to spoil the good ones with something
off-kilter so you can have an even better one later.

general motion: i enjoy making it feel like the whole track
is melting or something. you let the notes start at their
normal pitch and bend the sustain/release down very
carefully.

how you've warped the previous notes determines how you need
to warp the next notes to keep the feel going. sort of like
dragon scale.

or perhaps more like stacking logs. if you aren't careful
about how you build it up in the middle you can wind up
having the edge of the pile collapse on ya. how you
distribute the weight of the logs amongst the logs clearly
involves calculus and so a full explain will have to wait


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-16 17:06 [#02534150]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534148



i want to make it all tension and be an asshole


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 17:54 [#02534155]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular



Thinking about pitches with letters has always really
confused me, i think it's easier to understand with
numbers... I've also never really understood how any eg.
major scale is meant to be intrinsically any different to
any other major scale, as it's all the same intervals...
unless you have perfect pitch, or believe in stuff like
solfeggio frequencies.


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 17:55 [#02534157]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular



(or use Just intonation)


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 18:10 [#02534162]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular



just had a bit of an epiphany about the letters thing.. Of
course it doesn't matter where you are putting A440, it's
the relationship between the different scales that defines
them. (And the letters are as handy as numbers,moot point)


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 18:38 [#02534166]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



yes, there's an echo of aphex's comments in this thread. "i
change the 440hz setting on everything! i start by making up
scales!"

then you have someone like me sitting on the outside of
that. i'd say, "i like the feeling of this track, the taste
of the harmonics, let's try and do that in cubase." then i
would go off to cubase and duplicate the same feel.

my approach, however, was to start off with normal tuned
things and carefully mess them up until they sounded
aphex-y. is it the same result with a different approach? or
is the structure fundamentally different, because he's doing
the detuning much earlier in the pipeline?

meanwhile, over on hardware -- i changed the 440hz setting,
once, because i like digging through synth menus in search
of the weird shit. it didn't really do anything i noticed --
i think i'd just built a paia fatman kit at the time and
v/osc scale on that has never been right, everything was out
of tune already


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 18:38 [#02534167]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to mermaidman: #02534150



i want to make it all tension and be an asshole

LAZY_TITLE


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 18:40 [#02534169]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534167



but then there are much more effective ways to be an
asshole


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 18:47 [#02534171]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02534155



Thinking about pitches with letters has always really
confused me, i think it's easier to understand with
numbers.


how about just thinking of them as samples?

unless you're working with pure sine waves, there's a lot of
harmonic content in the sound that's not really covered by
the ol' notestaff


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 19:04 [#02534172]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02534171



midikeys, with some base added as a root
TTSTTTS for maj scal = 0,2,4,5,7,9,11
Then you can work out which major or minor triads work on
each note of the scale by checking if [0,3,7] or [0,4,7] are
in the set for it...



 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 19:13 [#02534174]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular



heh i thought you were asking me a Q then, never mind.
Got a good point there though. That's what is so frustrating
about dreaming music, you'll never ever get it like you
dreamt it - timbrally/processing wise.


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-16 19:18 [#02534177]
Points: 6195 Status: Regular



(Though maybe if you spend months and months with a
particular set up and it starts to invade your dreams; then
you'll dream the song as actions on your setup)


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2017-10-16 19:46 [#02534181]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



steve did you ever try microtuning or colundi scale?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 20:02 [#02534182]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02534177



i have an extremely good short-term memory for sounds, but
getting things to make the leap to long-term memory can be
much more difficult.

i've lost count of the number of times i've thought up
something cool in my head, then when i sit down to do it, my
brain gets subsumed by the notes in front of me and i
actually forget what i was trying to do in the first place.
like, if i don't get the right notes pretty quickly, the
wrong ones will fill up my short-term memory and i'll have
lost the bit i originally sat down to transcribe. this
sucks.

this issue works to my advantage, though, when i sit there
detuning loads of individual notes, getting them to sound
just right. a half second of music becomes my whole
universe; the rest of the song is not really in my brain.
without that, i don't think i could coherently make
melty-sounding trax


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 20:02 [#02534183]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



something something neuroplastic; something something tiered
hierarchical caching


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 22:30 [#02534213]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



so -- i'm doing my thing [described above] and i've slid into
a hip-hop groove and so i'm picking out horns instead of
rave stabs; ok. i load up "horn_swipe.wav" and it's perfect,
but... no, "these horns need to be more sour," i think to
myself, and immediately go to slide "fine tune" down.

you might think what i meant was, "this is too sharp" or
"this should be more flat," but it's more specific. it was
actually fairly in tune with everything already, i just
wanted it to be out of tune in a certain way that i would
describe as "sour."


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 22:52 [#02534216]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



now that the horns are sufficiently sour, i would also
describe them as significantly more "dank."

now i am going to make them moreso with portamento


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-16 23:00 [#02534217]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



now i'm bored of it and i think i'll just start another.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2017-10-18 03:29 [#02534304]
Points: 24389 Status: Addict



better


 

offline Indeksical from Phobiazero Damage Control (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-18 07:22 [#02534307]
Points: 10671 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



I just do whatever sounds ok to me. Got away with it so far
and never got questioned about it at uni.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-18 09:48 [#02534308]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to Indeksical: #02534307



at uni?


 

offline Indeksical from Phobiazero Damage Control (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-18 12:36 [#02534313]
Points: 10671 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534308 | Show recordbag



I'm finishing up a PhD in music by composition and have zero
music theory knowledge.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-18 12:44 [#02534314]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to Indeksical: #02534313



wow. i'm very interested. if you have no music theory
knowledge how do you study/research music composition?


 

offline Indeksical from Phobiazero Damage Control (United Kingdom) on 2017-10-18 13:35 [#02534315]
Points: 10671 Status: Regular | Followup to mermaidman: #02534314 | Show recordbag



Well my undergraduate was in creative music technology so it
was around 50% composition and 50% production based. When I
was like 24 I got bored of working shitty jobs that I kept
changing every few months and so I decided to see if I could
get in to uni. I sent them a CD and it was strong enough for
me to be accepted without qualifications and due to my being
older.

It was very daunting at first but the university are very
open to non-traditional composition/scoring etc. so I would
always lean towards citing things like oramics or
plunderphonics or musique concrète and my compositions
would reflect that. Having a lot of my stuff already being
sample based helped.

If I was required to possess some traditional theory
knowledge I'd book a meeting with the lecturer, ask him
'what the fuck am I supposed to know?', read what they
suggested, use it and promptly forget it. That's me being
useless though.

Somehow I graduated top of my class and they asked me to do
a masters. I expressed concern that I wasn't skilled enough
but they pushed me again towards non-traditional composition
so I started working on a suite of non-linear interactive
compositions in Max/MSP. No traditional scoring or analysis
required, with contextualisation amongst other experimental
works being more important. Once I'd finished the work the
uni felt it was worth expanding to a PhD so here I am. It's
90 mins of composition with 20,000 words which is
surprisingly little when you have to talk about 18
installations, how they work, what the rules and framework
are etc. Basically zero room for the discussion of chords,
tempo etc, particularly when those are dictated by the
listener.


 

offline mermaidman on 2017-10-18 13:46 [#02534316]
Points: 8033 Status: Lurker | Followup to Indeksical: #02534315



wow that is very cool indeksical. i know you release music,
i have a guess but just to make sure what was your alias
again?


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2017-10-18 20:17 [#02534345]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



I'm finishing up a PhD in music by composition and have
zero
music theory knowledge.


dont know if i should lol or prostrate


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2017-10-18 20:23 [#02534346]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



good luck with the master sam


 


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