The Music Thread
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Mowl
Member
I was going to reply with a tongue-in-cheek A Flock Of Seagulls video, but decided against it.
I studied music and radio production with a small Irish company called Sound Track Services who back then provided Ireland's professional recording studio needs with both Ampex tape for analog multi-track recordings as well as designing and setting up massive custom-built mixing desks and outboards into their designated space with best quality international standard results. Their business model was excellent: they operated as a national endorser for Ampex but also for a number of mixing desk designers working with the (then) all-new SSL (Solid State Logic) digital recall functions which allowed engineers to build mixes channel by channel without losing any information down to the nano-second and to peak performance.
My studio/engineering tutor was a guy called Tony Faulkner, and the radio guy is Denis Murray:
He was a household DJ name in his day, but once he crossed into the studio recording end of things he was lost, hadn't a clue what was going on and in one case I was asked to take over lecturing and demonstrating modern programming methods from his fumbling about with drum machines and sequencers while he was clearly way out of his depth. A rude, gruff, ignorant son of a bitch, I gave him hell and he ultimately tore up my thesis submission at the end of the six months which I sent back to his boss who in turn made him change my grade and mark it down as a part-pupil part-tutor thesis from an experienced engineer, already working in the music business with maximum grades. He was pissed. Though he was even more pissed at the end of term party when I walked in the door with my then living partner and Ireland's top fashion model. His jaw hit the floor, as did everyone else's but in his case I smiled and winked and let him know what he was missing and with whom he was messing with.
I learned a lot from Tony: he was passionate about music and he was a great tutor. His previous work record was working as engineer on couple of albums by Nik Kershaw, and his tall tales of working with the little guy were awesome. Kershaw was extremely persnickety about his guitar tone. So much so that on some songs, he removed some strings from his guitar but still held down the chords (as though they were there) in one take, then removing the remaining strings and adding the ones previously removed to do exactly the same thing in time/sync with the previous take. It was a fucking awesome. Two takes of the same guitar: first with four strings, then another with just two strings. All of his tracks were recorded to click tracks so his drummers had to be tight, on point, and snappy.
Lots of pop songs are built around a few simple chords and by a rather obvious pop arrangement device we all recognize:
Intro
Verse I
Bridge I
Chorus I
Verse II
Bridge II
Chorus II
Middle 8th (usually with a key change)
Chorus
Verse III
Chorus (repeat)
Fade
The last two blocks (Chorus Repeat and/or Fade) are interchangeable and can be used both ways depending on how many mixes/versions are required (radio mix, usually three minutes max) or a club mix (usually a longer version with verses that have no singing and/or long solo breaks on) and then other more specific dance format versions (house/techno/drum&bass/etc) and finally a version with everything in but NO main vocals at all. This one is for television appearances where the vocal is live but the band are miming (see Old Grey Whistle Test/Top Of The Pops/Live At Three/etc).
Tony Faulkner had magic ears, much like Kershaw himself, so between the two of them they could take a three chord block-built song apart and transpose it into something that required an orchestrated arrangement featuring multiple musicians doing multiple takes. Then comes the mixing and mastering stage and that too requires a degree of magic from all of the players as well as engineers/producers.
I wasn't a huge fan of 1980s pop, bands like A Flock Of Seagulls, Howard Jones, The Safety Dance guys and so on weren't on my radar, but I did learn a lot about 80s music and production and it's stood the test of time. Here's one of Tony and Nik's better known tracks which did very well for him at the time:
There are dozens of ways of writing and crafting a song.
There are infinite ways to arrange it.
There are multiple ways to record it.
There are post-recording/final-stage things one can do with compression/ EQ/Mastering/etc.
Artwork and presentation also matters: image is half the content in the music business.
But it starts with a great song, and while there's no one-size-fits-all method, we all know a hit when we hear one. Lennon and McCartney worked well together, if the one wrote a verse/chorus structure, then the other would write a key change/middle eight that the first author didn't consider. Some write alone, think Leonard Cohen and/or John Denver. Some write as groups: think U2 and/or INXS. It's not a case of the songwriter coming in with a finished song ready for tape. It's down to the whole band jamming out the ideas and stretching their limits to maximum perfection.
You can add an orchestra, a street marching band, a funky horn section, a gospel choir, or anything else you might like, but without a song?
Forget it (think Sigue-Sigue Sputnik/Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Bow-Wow-Wow, etc) - you're already history: you missed the bus, Pal.
One hit wonders.
Like Oasis - it's the same formula over and over again, and anyone who knows anything about music can spot it a mile off.
It's not even parody - it's simple theft.
Time doesn't favour crap, not even from Mancunian boneheads.
I studied music and radio production with a small Irish company called Sound Track Services who back then provided Ireland's professional recording studio needs with both Ampex tape for analog multi-track recordings as well as designing and setting up massive custom-built mixing desks and outboards into their designated space with best quality international standard results. Their business model was excellent: they operated as a national endorser for Ampex but also for a number of mixing desk designers working with the (then) all-new SSL (Solid State Logic) digital recall functions which allowed engineers to build mixes channel by channel without losing any information down to the nano-second and to peak performance.
My studio/engineering tutor was a guy called Tony Faulkner, and the radio guy is Denis Murray:
He was a household DJ name in his day, but once he crossed into the studio recording end of things he was lost, hadn't a clue what was going on and in one case I was asked to take over lecturing and demonstrating modern programming methods from his fumbling about with drum machines and sequencers while he was clearly way out of his depth. A rude, gruff, ignorant son of a bitch, I gave him hell and he ultimately tore up my thesis submission at the end of the six months which I sent back to his boss who in turn made him change my grade and mark it down as a part-pupil part-tutor thesis from an experienced engineer, already working in the music business with maximum grades. He was pissed. Though he was even more pissed at the end of term party when I walked in the door with my then living partner and Ireland's top fashion model. His jaw hit the floor, as did everyone else's but in his case I smiled and winked and let him know what he was missing and with whom he was messing with.
I learned a lot from Tony: he was passionate about music and he was a great tutor. His previous work record was working as engineer on couple of albums by Nik Kershaw, and his tall tales of working with the little guy were awesome. Kershaw was extremely persnickety about his guitar tone. So much so that on some songs, he removed some strings from his guitar but still held down the chords (as though they were there) in one take, then removing the remaining strings and adding the ones previously removed to do exactly the same thing in time/sync with the previous take. It was a fucking awesome. Two takes of the same guitar: first with four strings, then another with just two strings. All of his tracks were recorded to click tracks so his drummers had to be tight, on point, and snappy.
Lots of pop songs are built around a few simple chords and by a rather obvious pop arrangement device we all recognize:
Intro
Verse I
Bridge I
Chorus I
Verse II
Bridge II
Chorus II
Middle 8th (usually with a key change)
Chorus
Verse III
Chorus (repeat)
Fade
The last two blocks (Chorus Repeat and/or Fade) are interchangeable and can be used both ways depending on how many mixes/versions are required (radio mix, usually three minutes max) or a club mix (usually a longer version with verses that have no singing and/or long solo breaks on) and then other more specific dance format versions (house/techno/drum&bass/etc) and finally a version with everything in but NO main vocals at all. This one is for television appearances where the vocal is live but the band are miming (see Old Grey Whistle Test/Top Of The Pops/Live At Three/etc).
Tony Faulkner had magic ears, much like Kershaw himself, so between the two of them they could take a three chord block-built song apart and transpose it into something that required an orchestrated arrangement featuring multiple musicians doing multiple takes. Then comes the mixing and mastering stage and that too requires a degree of magic from all of the players as well as engineers/producers.
I wasn't a huge fan of 1980s pop, bands like A Flock Of Seagulls, Howard Jones, The Safety Dance guys and so on weren't on my radar, but I did learn a lot about 80s music and production and it's stood the test of time. Here's one of Tony and Nik's better known tracks which did very well for him at the time:
There are dozens of ways of writing and crafting a song.
There are infinite ways to arrange it.
There are multiple ways to record it.
There are post-recording/final-stage things one can do with compression/ EQ/Mastering/etc.
Artwork and presentation also matters: image is half the content in the music business.
But it starts with a great song, and while there's no one-size-fits-all method, we all know a hit when we hear one. Lennon and McCartney worked well together, if the one wrote a verse/chorus structure, then the other would write a key change/middle eight that the first author didn't consider. Some write alone, think Leonard Cohen and/or John Denver. Some write as groups: think U2 and/or INXS. It's not a case of the songwriter coming in with a finished song ready for tape. It's down to the whole band jamming out the ideas and stretching their limits to maximum perfection.
You can add an orchestra, a street marching band, a funky horn section, a gospel choir, or anything else you might like, but without a song?
Forget it (think Sigue-Sigue Sputnik/Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Bow-Wow-Wow, etc) - you're already history: you missed the bus, Pal.
One hit wonders.
Like Oasis - it's the same formula over and over again, and anyone who knows anything about music can spot it a mile off.
It's not even parody - it's simple theft.
Time doesn't favour crap, not even from Mancunian boneheads.
Mowl
Member
U2’s Larry Mullen Jr on his dyscalculia: Counting bars is like climbing Everest
The Irish musician revealed that he cannot count or add because of the learning difficulty.
www.thejournal.ie
Now there's a thing? I read this article earlier and it really stumped me. Apparently Larry has a numerical learning difficulty called dyscalculia, which makes it very hard for him to count and measure music (and other shit) mathematically. I may have a slightly similiar issue myself in that I fucking hate doing math and mostly because the man who tried to beat it into me was a fucking cunt of the highest order who put me off math for life. So much so that I told him in advance he could ram the leaving cert paper as far up his arse as he could. I attended the exam and signed my name and handed in an empty answer sheet for which he came after me to give me a slap but by then I had no fear of the fucker and I clattered him before he even raised a hand to me.
Since then my use of Pythagoras' theorem and my twelve times tables has been minimal, at best.
But, getting back to Larry: I'm amazed to learn that about him. Larry's a very private person and on the very few occasions you've ever seen him being interviewed, you can see that he's extremely uncomfortable being questioned. Perhaps he had a math teacher like mine*, who seemed to think that battering your long equations and your sin, cos, and tan into the kids heads was a good idea.
*John Cotter, by the way - he's still alive (last I heard) and whose Volksvagen Beetle I repainted for him by leaving an open tin of blue oil paint turned upside down on the roof of his car to keep the paint in until the can was lifted. Because fuck him anyway.
One thing that always struck me about Larry's style of drumming is that you can hear immediately how he uses basic math principles to arrange his drum parts into the song, which from the start were uniquely clever ways of making the beats part of the music/song by using the value of a beat/note in single, double, and quadruple forms to create complex parts that thoroughly drove the song along and kept it steady and to the clock.
As a marching band drummer for a few years (I did six weeks with St Louise's Pipe & Reed to learn my rudiments and then quit) Larry played with The Artane Boy's Band. You can really hear the rudiments in his playing too: think 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday' and the militant/marching intro on the drums. It's like an early morning drill, marching around the square in step, four clear and very definite corners. The genius in his playing was in the way he took the four beats of the bar and divided them first into eighth notes, then divided that again into sixteen notes. That's basically his entire repertoire. But man did he ride it bareback and create a sound and style entirely of his own.
Larry always gets the Ringo treatment from the drumming establishment. You never see him interviewed in the drumming magazine clique. He doesn't play jazz, he doesn't try to swing. He uses only what he knows and trusts and does it in incredible style all told. It struck me right away after hearing the first single 'U23' from 1979 and then later getting to see him doing it live at The Dandelion Market with my big sister: his parts were strikingly clever, they were a part of the song, the lyrics, the whole shebang, they weren't just beats keeping time. They told their own story. Given that his maximum reach was usually all of the sixteenth notes in the bar, he knew when to halve it and when to quadruple it. When to play hard into the beat and when to drag it. So songs like these three on the first EP on CBS records (which I had a signed copy of) were actually way ahead of their time. And totally unique on the Irish scene.
It's like he was a drum machine with a limited capacity adhering to the sixteenth note rule which he chopped up like a jigsaw and then switched bits of it around like he was playing with Lego. Brilliant, very fucking clever, very unique too. After all: who wants to mimic Larry? It's like trying to mimic Charlie Watts or Stewart Copeland. Why bother? It's theirs, and the best you can do is to copy it, because you'll never think/dream it up yourself. These guys learned their trade from the bottom up. So fuck the begrudgery, I say. Larry's ours. He's uniquely Irish and uniquely Dubliner. He's not looking for the spotlight, he doesn't do drum solos, he never did. He's the First Officer in the cockpit, holding it all together and doing so under a strange learning difficulty/affliction with numerical theory.
He says the reason he always looks so strained when he's playing is because he's counting bars in his head while playing them to a click track on a huge stage in front of tens of thousands of people, night after night. Personally, I think the guy's fucking awesome. He took the few simple things he knows and tore them to shreds every time, then put them back together to make you shake your hips and drive your fist into the air, and always managing to stay unique and ahead of his game.
Four songs on which I think Larry did some beautiful work, from 1979 through to 2000 and still going strong.
Mowl
Member
Got a bit stuck into an historic U2 buzz there, and have been checking out things I hadn't seen or heard before by U2 (I'm not exactly their biggest fan) and this one caught my attention. It's a classic example of Larry's genius in knowing where to add a beat and where to miss one. And all of it within the sixteenth note rule described earlier too.
Another very obvious U2 rhythm in 4/4 where Larry hops and trips the back-beat on the snare drum surging the song forward in a consistent and accurate tempo and he never gets in anyone's way - quite the contrary. Edge's guitar rhythms over Larry's (near) break-beats are what propel the song forward. It's like they were using the basic idea behind reggae: the bass is the lead instrument, not the guitar. The guitar is a rhythm instrument, just like the drums. A consistent loop of drums and guitar that lends space to the bass guitar to fuck around a bit within the overall framework.
And let's face it: Adam Clayton never kidded himself he was Jaco or Mingus. But he nailed what he did do. 100%.
Still, check out how Larry uses a standard 4/4 to create a dozen new ways to play a drum track that has an arrangement full of motifs all of its own:
Plus he's playing at the exact same tempo at the end as he was in the beginning: try it - he keeps perfect time.
Another very obvious U2 rhythm in 4/4 where Larry hops and trips the back-beat on the snare drum surging the song forward in a consistent and accurate tempo and he never gets in anyone's way - quite the contrary. Edge's guitar rhythms over Larry's (near) break-beats are what propel the song forward. It's like they were using the basic idea behind reggae: the bass is the lead instrument, not the guitar. The guitar is a rhythm instrument, just like the drums. A consistent loop of drums and guitar that lends space to the bass guitar to fuck around a bit within the overall framework.
And let's face it: Adam Clayton never kidded himself he was Jaco or Mingus. But he nailed what he did do. 100%.
Still, check out how Larry uses a standard 4/4 to create a dozen new ways to play a drum track that has an arrangement full of motifs all of its own:
Plus he's playing at the exact same tempo at the end as he was in the beginning: try it - he keeps perfect time.
Mowl
Member
This is my neighbour and friend from Ballyfermot, Kevin Malone.
An incredible musician, he taught me the more complex rudiments of drumming when I was a kid. What I didn't get from studying marching band rudiments, he took me through during one-to-one classes with an old-fashioned turntable always at hand to play me records that featured the very things we were sharing.
He once played me a single by Toto callled 'Rosanna', which I turned my nose up at. So he stopped the record and started it again, this time on 33rpm rather than the correct 45rpm. By slowing it down, he showed me where the emphasis in the rhythm was and where to let things breathe. The times we shared we a lightning rod of wonder to me.
This is his own work, a sort of homage to Samuel Beckett from under the shadow of Seamus Heaney.
The Panic: 'Three Days Before Christmas'
An incredible musician, he taught me the more complex rudiments of drumming when I was a kid. What I didn't get from studying marching band rudiments, he took me through during one-to-one classes with an old-fashioned turntable always at hand to play me records that featured the very things we were sharing.
He once played me a single by Toto callled 'Rosanna', which I turned my nose up at. So he stopped the record and started it again, this time on 33rpm rather than the correct 45rpm. By slowing it down, he showed me where the emphasis in the rhythm was and where to let things breathe. The times we shared we a lightning rod of wonder to me.
This is his own work, a sort of homage to Samuel Beckett from under the shadow of Seamus Heaney.
The Panic: 'Three Days Before Christmas'
Kevin's first release previously posted to this thread: https://islepoli.com/threads/the-music-thread.5/post-9855