Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
L-Spiro wrote:
Do Runnin’ on Empty, Hollywood Nights, and Rhiannon please.
All 3 are songs to which I listen rather frequently.
L. Spiro
I learned part of Runnin' on Empty, but since the song is more of a band effort than a piano piece, and since I can't arrange music for piano, it's not that good. I learned the intro to The Load Out, however, and it sounds great and I'd like to learn the rest of it (ironically, The Load Out is, in my eyes at least, the ultimate band song, but the piano is the real backbone here).
Hollywood Nights was the first Bob Seger song I knew, and I love it to death but I don't know if it would be his most interesting song on piano... I would LOVE to learn Against the Wind, since it's mostly piano anyway. Beautiful Loser might be nice.
And Rhiannon, YES. I would definitely try to learn this.
But then, I was like :(
Seriously though, thanks a lot Specter. [Pointless] Boy, what do you mean by finding a less mind-numbing transcription?
I don't know why you are unhappy to be critiqued. You should be eager to improve. Anyway, by transcription I mean the version of the music you are playing. The song was originally written in one form (for vocals, piano, various other backing instruments), and now you are playing it transcribed into another form (for solo piano.) Different formats generally have different requirements, and I don't think the transcription you are playing is well-suited for solo piano.
L-Spiro wrote:
But with critiques like the recent one(s) I am not so sure I want to post anymore.
My response to Fabian's playing was incredibly mild, if that's what's got you down I can't really see why it should be so. Anyway, your choice of music was good and your playing is fine. Keep practicing and keep up the good work.
Fabian wrote:
Spiro, don't let some condescending elitist douchebag who doesn't know how to talk to people like a normal person dissuade you from posting.
The vehemence of your response is misplaced. I gave you a very mild critique that said virtually nothing of substance about your playing. Moreover, "you're fine for an amateur" certainly isn't insulting, even if it's not the exaggerated praise you got from everyone else.
My main contention was just that you should find a better version of the music, and you instantly started spewing caustic vitriol. I'm not sure how my suggestion prompted such a series of bitter and violent outbursts from you, but perhaps you should take a step back and reexamine the situation. Nobody here is out to get you.
Meanwhile, in Fabian's imagination ...
... ALSO YOU PLAY WORSE THAN A ONE-ARMED RETARD! MY INCONTINENT GRANDMOTHER HAS HAD FARTS MORE MUSICAL THAN YOUR PLAYING!
Critique is great. I don't understand why you think I wouldn't want to hear some constructive criticism. Of course I would.
Thanks for the clarification on the transcription thing. Honestly I still don't really understand what you mean though. How should a transcription for solo piano sound, in your opinion?
Anyway, obviously I'm not interested in arguing these other points with you. You're entitled to your opinion, am am I, which is fine. Rock on!
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
Pointless Boy wrote:
ElectroSpecter wrote:
[Sheer hyperbole]
Sorry, but how is an opinion "sheer hyperbole?" Perhaps if I had said "I watched the Lion King one million times when I was little," or, "Fabian, you are truly a God of the Keys who puts scum like Sir Elton to shame."
But really... I'm just praising him. Just because our opinions don't coincide doesn't mean that mine is exaggerated.
Critique is great. I don't understand why you think I wouldn't want to hear some constructive criticism. Of course I would.
Thanks for the clarification on the transcription thing. Honestly I still don't really understand what you mean though. How should a transcription for solo piano sound, in your opinion?
Anyway, obviously I'm not interested in arguing these other points with you. You're entitled to your opinion, am am I, which is fine. Rock on!
A few points about your playing, and here I'm just referring to Can You Feel The Love Tonight:
You speed up quite a bit throughout the piece. Try to maintain a constant tempo. Paradoxically, being able to maintain a rock steady tempo will ultimately be what allows you to make effective use of rubato.
You start playing at a comfortable mezzoforte, and then steadily get louder and louder and louder, with no dynamic variation other than constant growth. Try adding in some piano sections even if they aren't indicated in the music. Not only will it give the music more depth, but being able to play softly is a skill you need to learn. As above, being able to consistently voice notes at low volume will ultimately be what allows you to make effective use of dynamic variation.
Somewhat related, you tend to SLAM your hands down on the keyboard, as opposed to pressing keys with your fingers, especially when you're playing big chords. Unless the music indicates all those notes should be heavily accented, that's not an appropriate technique, as its overuse makes music sound mechanical and clunky. The main reason people make this mistake is because it's very difficult to voice all the notes in a chord cleanly and concurrently with just finger pressure. It's a skill that takes years to learn, so for a long time your chords may sound jumbly.
There are a lot of little ornaments throughout the piece that you treat as if they are as important as the melody. Try to play them more softly. The melody should basically always be the dominant voice, but the way you are playing right now there is no dominant voice. Playing multiple notes at different volumes or with different levels of articulation is really difficult, but that's one of the little touches that can take you from good to great. It's something to think about.
Now for my thoughts on the transcription. The whole thing is filled to the brim with syncopated interplay between the left hand drone, the right hand melody, and various little flourishes, grace notes, rhythmic doublings, etc. in both hands (though mainly the right hand.) There's way too much of it, and the music sounds incredibly busy and unfocused. Whatever structure and flow the music could have gets ļǿşť ǐǹ ŧħǝ ƨƕƭƒſɇ.
All the novel techniques composers use to make listeners's ears perk up really cease to be novel when an entire piece is nothing but those embellishments, especially when the whole piece is dominated by just one or two of them. It's kind of like when you are reading a book and you can tell the author is REALLY in love with some word or phrase because he uses it entirely out of proportion with its normal usage in the language. R.A. Salvatore is terrible about this. I think he uses the word "limn" and the phrase "purely on instinct" at least 100 times each in every book he writes. It's very tedious and back when I still bothered to read his drivel I found myself wondering if he couldn't stop having his characters stand in windows/doorways/caves limned in candlelight/moonlight/sunlight every other page ... or at the very least just invest in a fucking thesaurus.
Music is exactly the same way. It becomes very tedious and hard to listen to when it's just the same thing over and over again. And here's the kicker: I realize there was actually significant variation from one repetition to the next in the transcription you played. It may as well have been the same 10 measures played over and and over again, though, because each variation sounded exactly the same: a giant messy blob of notes. There was no natural progression or development, nothing interesting to be remembered or described, no way to identify one section or distinguish it from the one that followed.
I'm generalizing here, but with most good music you can say things like, "Oh, this is the part where the melody was played by the left hand," "This is the part where there was an interesting syncopated rhythm," "This is the part where the melody was doubled in octaves," "This is the part where there was that cool progression of embellishment from grace note to mordent to gruppetto," "This is the part where one of the notes in the melody unexpectedly changed," etc., etc. There are countless musical tricks one can use, I couldn't begin to list them all. The key is to combine them over the course of a piece in such a way that each section has its own identity. There is very little of that in the particular transcription of Can You Feel The Love Tonight that you played. There's just "the beginning" and "any of the very similar, highly syncopated, and messily embellished variations of the theme."
Sorry, but how is an opinion "sheer hyperbole?" Perhaps if I had said "I watched the Lion King one million times when I was little," or, "Fabian, you are truly a God of the Keys who puts scum like Sir Elton to shame."
But really... I'm just praising him. Just because our opinions don't coincide doesn't mean that mine is exaggerated.
Of fairly average playing, of a pretty bad transcription, you said, "Wow, this is amazing!" But I suppose speaking plainly and without rancor is somewhere between murder and pedophilia nowadays. Next time I should just stab someone and thereby avoid all the controversy.
I think the problem was not the critique, but the really blunt and harsh words you used, which felt disrespectful.
Perhaps, but none of my blunt words were directed at Fabian. Of Fabian, I said, "You are fine for an amateur." That doesn't seem particularly blunt, harsh, or disrespectful to me. My words describing the particular version of the piece he chose were less kind, but unless he actually wrote the transcription, he's got nothing to get bent out of shape about. Also, had I suspected he wrote the transcription, I would have been nicer. As it stands, there is no particular reason to observe social niceties when talking about whatever phantom entity wrote the crappy transcription Fabian downloaded from the web.
Joined: 8/6/2006
Posts: 784
Location: Connecticut, USA
Pointless Boy wrote:
Of fairly average playing, of a pretty bad transcription, you said, "Wow, this is amazing!" But I suppose speaking plainly and without rancor is somewhere between murder and pedophilia nowadays. Next time I should just stab someone and thereby avoid all the controversy.
You obviously know a lot more about music technique than I do, and I felt like you were being condescending about my comment (which I guess may have been a naive comment, but hey, I've never taken lessons or anything). On the other hand, I'm far from ignorant when it comes to music in general, so I'm not going to withhold any opinions.
Pointless Boy wrote:
between murder and pedophilia
I'm sorry if I came off as jumping down your throat. I hate arguing, so please try to understand that I wasn't attacking you.
I think the problem was not the critique, but the really blunt and harsh words you used, which felt disrespectful.
Perhaps, but none of my blunt words were directed at Fabian. Of Fabian, I said, "You are fine for an amateur." That doesn't seem particularly blunt, harsh, or disrespectful to me. My words describing the particular version of the piece he chose were less kind, but unless he actually wrote the transcription, he's got nothing to get bent out of shape about. Also, had I suspected he wrote the transcription, I would have been nicer. As it stands, there is no particular reason to observe social niceties when talking about whatever phantom entity wrote the crappy transcription Fabian downloaded from the web.
I don't understand, do you think I obtained a bunch of sheet music with this exact version transcribed, and learned it like that, note for note? Of course it's "written" by me, I play by ear. The idea that you would think otherwise for a second is reasonably funny to me, and pretty clearly shows that we're speaking in very different languages.
FWIW, here's a link to the chords I've based my playing on: http://www.eltonchords.com/chord_library/canyoufeelthelovetonight.txt
Edit: Thanks for your more detailed thoughts on my playing. I definitely don't agree with everything, as is to be expected, but obviously realize my playing has very clear flaws, and that personal taste sometimes differs greatly. If you overlook the tone, which is still pretty condescending, it does show that you can indeed talk to people like a normal person, so I take that part back. Take care.
I don't understand, do you think I obtained a bunch of sheet music with this exact version transcribed, and learned it like that, note for note? Of course it's "written" by me, I play by ear. The idea that you would think otherwise for a second is reasonably funny to me, and pretty clearly shows that we're speaking in very different languages.
Well, the cat's out of the bag on the way I feel about the transcription. I won't apologize for thinking it's terrible, but I do apologize for not couching my opinion in social niceties. I didn't know the transcription was your own. Your playing is decent though amateurish, nevertheless the complexity of the transcription more closely resembles something I would expect a more experienced pianist to write. There are no hard and fast rules about any of this, that was just my impression.
Anyway, if you want help improving your compositional technique, my first piece of advice would be to start from a very simple version of the music, say, with just chords in the left hand and single-note melody in the right hand. From there, vary each repetition of the melody by giving it a unique identity through the exclusive (or nearly exclusive) use of a few variational techniques. As it stands it sounds like you threw every embellishment you've ever heard into every section of the song.
Take, for example, the classic Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star variations by Mozart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGThde7X2I. Each variation has a thematic structure for the method of variation, and then proceeds in a fairly predictable fashion once that structure has been revealed. Also, even the busiest of variations have brief sections of downtime, to give the piece balance and to allow the listener a moment of respite in which to rest his or her ears. Your music, on the other hand, is an introduction of the melody followed by wall-to-wall notes without rest. Allow your phrases to resolve and just hang, at least some of the time.
You might naturally ask why Elton John's version of Can You Feel The Love Tonight doesn't have to obey these rules. After all, every phrase in that song ends with him either pausing or holding a note, while the piano fills in some little embellishment, like so:
Vocal: "There's a calm surrender [pause...] To the rush of day [pause...]"
Piano: "[Mostly rhythmic chords] [flourish] [Rhymthic chords ] [flourish]"
In reality, despite the piano embellishments, he is following those rules. In the original version of the song, the focus is on the vocals, and each phrase gives the listener a little break in which they no longer need to pay attention and can rest their ears, because Elton is no longer singing. Since you have just a single instrument to work with, one of the best ways to provide a break to the listener is with a moment of silence.
Fabian wrote:
Edit: Thanks for your more detailed thoughts on my playing. I definitely don't agree with everything, as is to be expected, but obviously realize my playing has very clear flaws, and that personal taste sometimes differs greatly. If you overlook the tone, which is still pretty condescending, it does show that you can indeed talk to people like a normal person, so I take that part back. Take care.
Which parts don't you agree with? To my mind everything I said was factual and can be evaluated objectively. Yes, there is an implied value judgment in that I clearly believe "being able to make effective use of rubato" is intrinsically good, for example. You either did or did not maintain a steady tempo, however.
Kermit,
Apology accepted. Good job for being a non-douchebag, and apologizing. We're good. Also, I'm choosing to take "the complexity of the transcription more closely resembles something I would expect a more experienced pianist to write" as a compliment of sorts, so thanks for that as well :)
As for what I don't agree with in your earlier post, all the parts where you tell me (or anyone who reads it) what music "should" sound like or how it "should" be played is loltastic and, sorry, makes you look like a huge elitist douche (as per my snap judgment a few posts ago). I appreciate that you have some very specific thoughts on how the piano should be played, but telling others this is the only way to play the piano, or that any other way of playing is stupid/wrong/etc, is simply completely indefensible, on account of musical expression being an art, and everything.
Finally, as an aside, I played the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star variations by Mozart quite extensively back when I was 12-14, and still remember a few of them (mostly variations 1, 2, 3 and 10 if I recall correctly). I like them a lot, but am generally not a big fan of classical music (which, again as an aside, is why I stopped taking piano lessons when I was 13/14, and started playing for my own sake) and its (imo) exagerrated focus on practicing something really specific, and diverting from what's written down is considered bad, etc. I much prefer playing in a freer manner, and while I appreciate you don't feel the same way, I think you should appreciate others feeling differently, as well. I mean, I can certainly tell you know what you're talking about to some degree, but all these judgments you're making about how things "should" be while trying to pass it off as something other than just your opinoin.. not a big fan of that.
I've put the album I did a couple years ago (Myself, thread here) on my youtube account, so anyone can listen to it fully without having to buy it first. Also, each of the songs/videos also has subtitles with the lyrics, so hopefully it helps those of you who don't have English as your first language, who don't listen to rap, or have trouble keeping up with my cadence. Just click the CC button to see them.
JXQ - Myself (playlist)
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
JXQ, I see that you have confused this thread with another thread. You're supposed to be showcasing your musical talents here. I hope you will correct your mistake as soon as possible.
Your friend,
Fabi Brushy
Rap sucks lol!
FYI I understand this is a joke (at least hopefully I'm not misinterpreting), but it's worth a little rant here for extra hemlig skoj.
I've heard it all. It wasn't popular here when I was in school to listen to rap. Many people still feel their need to give me their two cents when they hear that I either listen to rap or make my own. Most of these people are older and I assume have difficulty understanding viewpoints other than their own.
Some of the things I've often heard: Rap doesn't use real instruments. Rap is just talking; anyone can do that. Rap always has violent, misogynistic, or ignorant content. Most of the people who seriously believe these things have not listened to much rap. Not that everyone must like any genre of music, but most of the time people try to justify not liking it without having heard much. If someone doesn't like it, they don't need a reason. Giving one makes me wonder why they feel the need to justify it.
There are a lot of good things about the genre that I'd like to point out. You can say much more in the same amount of time due to the faster cadence compared to most other genres. Rappers write their own lyrics more often than I think most other genres of music, which allows for more personal subject matter IMO. The available "instruments" to production in hip-hop is only limited to the producer's imagination, rather than a band's instrument set.
As far as how "musical" something like this is, keep in mind that I put a lot more work into this than just talking into a microphone. I wrote the lyrics, composed the beats, and did the mixing for these songs. Plus, I think that vocal delivery requires a sense of rhythm (and pitch sometimes), and practice - much like singing or playing a musical instrument.
Ultimately, it's in the eye of each individual, so I don't hold your opinion against you. Mostly because I like you, though :P
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
Hi, JXQ, I think your music would be even better if your articulation was more clear. I've noticed I find it considerably more difficult to follow your lyrics than those of other rap artists. I do realize you're already making a conscious effort at articulating the p/t sounds extra clearly though, but you could still work on pronouncing the other consonants and the vocals more distinctively. Try to imagine somebody who doesn't know the words / the English language. Would they still be able to make out the individual sounds with little effort?
Maybe you could work on varying your breathing techniques as well, and it'd make your rapping sound less mechanical. You seem to have a habit of using up most of your breath at the onset of the first (stressed) syllable of any given word (except for those sections were you use that "machine gun"-technique). Varying that up a bit more would probably add a lot of life and dynamics to your music.
I could see yourself becoming quite famous actually if you managed to raise the level of quality just an itsy-bit.
Also, please note I'm basing this just on intuition, I actually don't have a clue.
It'd probably also be a good idea to post the lyrics to your songs in the description section of Youtube.
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
I just finished this song for my new love interest, Uha.
http://memoryhacking.com/My%20Music/Heart%20of%20Uha.mp3
All parts recorded live (even the impossible piano parts; I just recorded in multiple passes and blended them).
The song is happy yet melancholic, just like a happy young woman who always gets tough breaks.
The heart of Uha is her daughter. That is why the song sounds so childish/playful underneath the pain. This song is for both of them.
L. Spiro
