who are your influences?

[gowans]

id love to mate but my attention span on these kind of things is zero! id rather just use my ear, than worry about using x y and z scale, mode, tuning. i dont really know the terminology, suppose this is a narrow minded view of mine because i dont understand!

different methods though innit, i prefer to approach stuff by just hearing things, than using science n maths and sh!t, maybes one day tho!

[oblioblioblio]

i'm pretty much the same. i do most of my tuning work by ear to be honest.

there is a deep science behind music though. and it completely relates to your understanding of music by ear.

i guess you gotta go with your personal flow with these things. you can get far by ear, but sometimes something will spark your interest in the science and you will see how things connect. it's all pretty obvious. you know what a saw wave sounds like. it's obvious. but if you look closer at the waveform on an oscilliscope (easy to find a free vst that will do that), or on those horizontal eq kinda views with spikes. you can see the science.

[AK]

id love to mate but my attention span on these kind of things is zero! id rather just use my ear, than worry about using x y and z scale, mode, tuning. i dont really know the terminology, suppose this is a narrow minded view of mine because i dont understand!

different methods though innit, i prefer to approach stuff by just hearing things, than using science n maths and sh!t, maybes one day tho!

Thing is, having theoretical knowledge doesnt necessarily mean you are capable of producing quality music anyway. Id value musicianship a hell of a lot more and a personal undestanding of harmony. Theres not really a connection between undestanding music and understanding harmonic principles. By that I mean, somebody could have the musical ability to produce really sophisticated music and not be able to name any of the chords or scales used. The important factor is that they understand it all on a personal level. The jargon is mainly for communication between other musicians.

But this implies that they also actually know theory whether they are aware of that fact or not. Its just they have personalised the concepts in ways which are applicable to them. I think thats an important point. Theory itself probably wont make you write better music whereas an understanding of music will and that understanding is always best developed in a practical application.

Its pretty damn hard NOT to pick up at least some theory, its almost impossible but as for it being beneficial, well thats probably down to the individual to decide and the only way that is going to be apparent is to learn it and see. For anyone wanting to learn, they only need start with intervals. Because with that grounding, chords, scales, modes and harmony all fall into place. It just seems more complicated than it is.

Also, its not like you suddenly stop doing things by ear, it just means you might be capable of communicating musical ideas to other musicians. Its essentially a language that when communicated verbally, somebody else knows what you are talking about and can 'hear' the concepts that are being discussed.

The stuff in the earlier posts is actually the opposite of how you interpreted it. When you said, 'worrying about x, y, z scale' thats precisely what wer'e not doing. It was more geared towards experimentation and actually avoiding certain intervals within a scale that force you into a restricted set of harmonic possibilities (namely 3rds of a scale which instantly put the stamp of major or minor on it)

I dont know if that makes sense but if anything, it was actually anti-theory to some degree, at least from the point of diatonic harmony and the concepts were centered around encouraging the going by ear thing and trusting to experimentation - which is essentially where it should be, especially for a forward thinking genre like techno.

[s.k.]

don't confuse analogue FM with DX7 style FM. those 80's digital synths are actually PM (phase modulation) and PD (phase distortion) synths. similar concepts but different enough to get totally different sounds out of them.

im not confusing them, actually my knowledge on the subject is pretty thorough, i meant something else... will start a new thread anyway

edit: thing is, Phase Distortion is just a fancy name for Phase Modulation, Casio just had to use a different name, which i am ok with. a much more shocking thing to realize though, is that FM and PM are in reality doing exactly the same thing! (this is only valid in the digital world). its too long of a subject to explain it completely here, but because of the way things happen in the digital realm, believe it or not, FM = PM. to anyone who can prove that wrong to me - Cheers!

now i really meant something else about the analogue vs. digital FM thing, but about that later

[s.k.]

dbl post...

scrolled up a little, i see oblioblio already said above that the results are quite similar... well its not only the results, its the exact same process... anyway, just utilized that double post

[oblioblioblio]

the methods for PM and FM are different. I think this is true in both the digital and the analogue domain. But I think the end result is basically the same.

Phase distortion is definitely different.

Made a quick post about FM in analogue above. COuld use it's own thread though.

[s.k.]

ok, a digital oscillator is a wavetable where you have one cycle of the waveform repeating itself for continuous playback. this continuous playback is achieved by changing the phase position of this wavetable to any point between 0 and 1. there are 44100 points for an audio rate. so the phase position moves from start to finish of that single cycle in order to play.

modulating its frequency by another oscillator means the playback speed of that cycle will vary according to the phase position of the modulator at any given time (this can be tricky to understand, because its the momentual amplitude of the modulator that modulates the frequency of the carrier), which is achieved by varying the speed of that exact same movement of the phase position, required for the carrier to play.

but to modulate the phase of the carrier (so that at any given moment its somewhere between 0 and 1), and do that continuously according to the modulators phase, is exactly the same thing...


* thats things broken down to some quite low level, actually i didnt wanna go here... i just tried to explain how there is a very tight relation between phase and frequency, because in digital environments, the only way to change frequency is by changing phase position! this is how digital works!

hope what i say gets through...

[s.k.]

Phase distortion is definitely different.

how?

phase modulation (distortion... whatever) was invented a digital technique... personally i never even heard of analogue phase modulation, because that would actually be frequency modulation...