David B said:
Hi all
I for one would be very interested in any possible musical collaboration.
My main instrument of choice is lead guitar, although I've had to teach myself a few other instruments in order to bring some compositions to life.
While I grew up listening to & playing hard rock / heavy metal, my musical interests have moved more into Neo classical / classical guitar playing of late, & I've also developed a very deep love of the Spanish Flamenco style playing, which I've been working into some of my heavier arrangements.
I posted a song in the music section of the forum under about a month ago for anyone who is interested in the type of music I'm currently working on.
I'm not entirely sure its everyones cup of tea but I'm proud of it, even if people don't like it, & I would hope that people could at least appreciate that there was a reasonable amount of musical technicality involved in writing it.
That being said their are plenty of musicians with wonderfull technical abilities & unfortunately this does not always translate into good music.
Anyway I think the idea of a collaboration is a great Idea & I think Id have no problems coming up with some musical Ideas to contribute even if it's just guitar leads or solos.
I also think the idea of pairing people up according to the styles is a good idea.
Cheers
Dave
Hi David B,
I've marked you down for main instrument lead guitar - classical and flamenco, possibility of rock but not first choice - with certain other instruments.
I know what you mean about technical ability not always translating into good music. Some people are fantastic playing other people's music but not so hot at composing. If we develop an effective process I think we will discover each person's strong points as we go. And keeping external consideration in mind, we will all need to accept what our roles will be based on the results we get in the beginning. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks for your input.
monotonic said:
My question, is how we are going to cultivate, share and preserve the vision of the final product once we have a direction.
I am also thinking, you are getting very specific here. Don't we need a specific project in mind before we set roles? We need an aim to organize this around I think. We might just be producing a singing piece, or we might be composing background music for a SOTT video.
I think every project should have a Cass related theme. Otherwise we are just a band with SOTT decals on all our equipment. I think we should ask all the heavy thinkers in Forum Central to provide us with themes (more specifically the SOTT editors?); I worry that in our relative vacuum here we will fail to get the ball rolling. There needs to be lateral thought across the forum sections to provide us with rich inspiration and include the insights of people who's daily studies preclude proximity to our project here.
I think we should not try to be overly self-providing. I think optimally our success or failure may hinge on our interaction with the rest of the forum. If we must come up with all our own themes, brainstorm all our own lyrics, etc, we will suffer from intellectual poverty.
What if we were to set up so that we would be ready at a moment's notice, to work on requests from forum members/SOTT editors?
I think I agree with Seppo about this. The project is open to anyone who wants to participate so I think the inspiration will be coming from anyone who joins. I also think that this forum is an ocean of inspiration all by itself - thousands of pages of ideas just waiting to be read. Most of the music I have written recently has been inspired by the things I have learned through The Work, and that's a lot of things.
It might be a good idea, right from the beginning, to post a kind of open invitation for lyricists and poets to post things for the group if they want to. If they do, we could end up with more ideas than we can handle, all at once. I don't see a possibility of a shortage of ideas with all the creativity already here on the forum.
As far as having a specific project in mind, writing for SOTT videos or getting themes from the editors, I think that would be getting ahead of ourselves. For the moment we need to develop a process that enables us to create a first rough mix of a complete composition. That's the very first step. Then we have to develop a process of production that will get us a decent recording of that piece. If we would like to be a group that the SOTT editors could turn to when they need music for something, we need to show them that we are capable of giving them what they need, with a level of quality that they can use. So for now I think we just need to get the group(s) together and work on ANY song with the goal of completing it, one way or another.
monotonic said:
Well we need to complete some projects and get to know the process, work out any issues. We have the idea, we need to proof it. Not unlike proofing bread yeast.
And don't forget about drums.
I think this is getting more complex than it needs to be. How about, just make a list of volunteers and their capabilities. Then decide where to start, notify the qualifying persons, set up a thread and so on. I think we should just go ahead with a rudimentary plan and address things as they come, with the focus on DOing things rather than being distracted by unnecessary planning.
I agree with your first paragraph. That is exactly what we need to do. But I'm not too sure about jumping right into DOing without planning it out a bit. Besides, planning IS DOing. I don't think this is "getting more complex than it needs to be". I think the idea itself is complex, particularly because it will have many people involved and also because we can't just get together in the same room and play - it's all on the internet. I think we need to organize with the intention of breaking down that complexity. Ideally, each member needs to know exactly what their role is so they know exactly what they need to do when something is forwarded to them. Simplify.
I wasn't involved with this project when it was first attempted, so I can't say for sure and I am not in any position to judge, but I got the impression that the reason it didn't get off the ground the way everyone wanted it to was because they started doing it without having done enough advance organization.
I'm not being judgmental when I say that. It was a first attempt, and all my thoughts on how we might organize it came from examining the important groundwork they did. I think what they discovered was that it really is a lot more complex than they thought it would be. That is what I am discovering, too - it's not so straight forward. I don't even know if we can get it to work over the internet like this, but I'm willing to try.
For now I think we need to reach out to the musicians and lyricists/poets and try to put one small group together that has all the elements necessary to create an entire tune. When we have that we can then decide how to proceed. If more people come along we would have to start forming a second group, and hopefully the first group will have had some success with their process that they can pass to the second group.
Seppo Ilmarinen said:
Yes, this kind of group changing ideas and working together is the direction we should take. I was thinking that there could be two major groups and three steps in this project: First there would be the composer group as sort of foundation group who writes lyrics, melody and harmony for the project. Any person could be in either all groups or in only one of them.
Then there would be arranging and recording part where would be needed to take consider all the instruments players who wanna participate (bass, guitar, piano, vocals etc). Arranging would happen between these two groups, so recording group could also arrange their own parts if they wish. for example, bass player could write bass line and guitar player chord voicings and solo etc. In the composing section the music style doesn't have to be that ready yet because you can always arrange the already done melody and harmony to many kind of music styles. That way both groups could still give their opinions to which direction the composition would go.
So in more detail the list could be like this:
part.1 part.2 part.3
Composer group---------> Arranging----------> Recording group---------------->
-Lyrics -Both groups together -All the instruments who wants to participate
-Melody bass line, chord voicing,
-Harmony music style in more detail etc.
So we could start with the part.1 to have something raw material and share it in here, then the
recording group could toss ideas and we could together start arrange the music to take more shape? And anyone could be in all groups if wished so.
Or does this sound too complicated and maybe simpler approach would work better? For example one person would just record something and then passing it to another and final music would shape through that process? Let me know! :)
We seem to be thinking along the same lines. These are all good suggestions that we might be able to apply along the way, but for now we have to form a part.1 group. Once that is done we need one member of that group to present an idea for a song that has a complete form - beginning to end. It could be lyrics sung to a melody, or a chord progression on guitar or piano, or maybe even a bass line. Then we can decide in what order we pass it along to the other members. That is how I see us developing the process.
By the way, what do you see yourself doing in this process? Do you play an instrument?
?
