The de-evolution of live music.....yes a DJ is a musician Bobby

There are a lot of musicians working on that stage, and the DJ works with them. My 5 year old grandson has a drum kit on his iPad, he can bash the buttons and make drum sounds. They're in time too, mostly. He's not a musician either! He can certainly make noises that are sympathetic to the vibe, but until somebody reclassifies turntables as musical instruments, he's a clever music technologist.
 
rob aylestone said:
. . .but until somebody reclassifies turntables as musical instruments.
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A turntable can be played to produce musical notes that will fit a musical context. That makes it a musical instrument in my book.

Wiki: "A musical instrument is an instrument created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument."

Free Dictionary: "musical instrument - any of various devices or contrivances that can be used to produce musical tones or sounds"

Collins: "anything that is used to produce music"

I agree that a turntable doesn't fit neatly into the traditional orchestral classifications of brass, woodwind etc, but according to any definition I can find, it is a musical instrument if used for that purpose.
 
Greg_L said:
He's mastered it to the point of being unlistenable wank music.
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That too. Its weird - even though he was still "shredding" his earlier music still sounded melodic and musical. He seems to just want to experiment with more and more increasingly weird techniques now.
 
JDOD said:
That too. Its weird - even though he was still "shredding" his earlier music still sounded melodic and musical. He seems to just want to experiment with more and more increasingly weird techniques now.
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That's what all of those shred wankers do. Like Steve Vai. They can play any and every not on a guitar at warp speed. There's no style or scale or technique or lick they can't play. So the only thing left for them to do to stay interested is to get weird.
 
Greg_L said:
That's what all of those shred wankers do. Like Steve Vai. They can play any and every not on a guitar at warp speed. There's no style or scale or technique or lick they can't play. So the only thing left for them to do to stay interested is to get weird.
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It doesn't have to be like that though - Bad Religion have been basically doing the same thing for 30 years. They're clearly really technically competent musicians but they haven't started writing 7/5 interludes using the Hungarian Minor mode.
 
JDOD said:
It doesn't have to be like that though - Bad Religion have been basically doing the same thing for 30 years. They're clearly really technically competent musicians but they haven't started writing 7/5 interludes using the Hungarian Minor mode.
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Bad Religion is a band that writes intellectually superior but technically average songs with the intent of being performed live as a band. Satriani is a solo act where his guitar playing is the sole focus.

On a "technically competent" scale, Joe Satriani is a 10, and the guys in Bad Religion are like maybe a 3.

On a listening scale, Bad Religion is a 10 and Joe Satriani is a 0.

There's not one guy in BR that comes anywhere near the technical musicianship of Satriani. That's probably why Bad Religion has stayed good as a band and Satriani is a circus sideshow whose only fans are guitar players.
 
Music is food for the soul. Like food, people acquire and develop a taste for what they "like" based upon where they live, what they are exposed to and what appeals to them on a personal level.

I would have never thought to use the noise of a record getting scratched as a musical tool to make rhythmic sounds but someone did and it has grown from there. ..
Definitely in that Herbie Hancock video it is a musical instrument.

Working in construction there are a lot of tools and machines that are rhythmic that I have never actually done it, I've thought about using ..i.e. jack hammers..drills etc.

On the shredding thing...I can appreciate and enjoy amazingly fast guitar playing when it is used as a part of a song and it fits..It definitely gets overdone and I lose interest.....growing up in a time when Alvin Lee playing "Going Home" was the shreddingist thing going ...in the late 70's early 80's it seemed to evolve into the equivalent of a Cowboy gunfight and who was the fastest gunslinger alive...it did become less about the soul and more about how many notes were played in a milisecond... I dig a lot of great "fast" players but Hendrix wrote and played beautifully and never had to exceed the speed limit once in his tiny little window of time making music.

In the end ...to each his own.
 
Greg_L said:
Bad Religion is a band that writes intellectually superior but technically average songs.

On a "technically competent" scale, Joe Satriani is a 10, and the guys in Bad Religion are like maybe a 3.

On a listening scale, Bad Religion is a 10 and Joe Satriani is a 0.

There's not one guy in BR that comes anywhere near the technical musicianship of Satriani. That's probably why Bad Religion has stayed good as a band and Satriani is a circus sideshow whose only fans are guitar players.
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I think Bad Religion use their music as a vehicle for what they have to say too, whereas JS uses his music to show his technical proficiency. So, whereas BR's lyrical content might evolve, they music doesn't necessarily have to. You're right that Satch is only listened to by guitar players I reckon - I don't think I've ever met a Satch fan that isn't a guitar player. At least with someone like Guthrie Govern, his fans are just into Jazz fusion and all sorts of weirdness - they're not just guitarists.

I played on one of them Satch guitars once - really nice guitar to play, but its very, very shreddy! Mikes my Ibanez look punky!

Another one that seems to sacrifice musicality for technical prowess is that weirdo, Buckethead.
 
JDOD said:
I think Bad Religion use their music as a vehicle for what they have to say too, whereas JS uses his music to show his technical proficiency. So, whereas BR's lyrical content might evolve, they music doesn't necessarily have to. You're right that Satch is only listened to by guitar players I reckon - I don't think I've ever met a Satch fan that isn't a guitar player. At least with someone like Guthrie Govern, his fans are just into Jazz fusion and all sorts of weirdness - they're not just guitarists.

I played on one of them Satch guitars once - really nice guitar to play, but its very, very shreddy! Mikes my Ibanez look punky!
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As a completely uninterested observer of the style, my best guess is that there are three big-name elite guitar shredders that exist to this day - Steve Vai, Yngwie, and Satriani. There are obviously other shredders, but those guys are top shelf as far as name recognition and consistent popularity goes. They are like the holy trinity of wankmanship. Of those three, Satriani is by far the most listenable IMO. His wanking still contains riffs and melody. It still sounds like rock music. Yngwie just shreds classical scales all over the place and Vai is frilly and weird.
 
The point of the OP was that "these times they are a changin"...
Some of the coolest , biggest, most happening concerts for the "teens to mid twenties" college aged crowd going on today are EDM concerts...Those dam young whipper snappers will certainly be the decline and demise of modern civilization as we know it...and maybe that's not a bad thing......:eek:........:laughings:.........Shred on Garth! :guitar:
 
Greg_L said:
As a completely uninterested observer of the style, my best guess is that there are three big-name elite guitar shredders that exist to this day - Steve Vai, Yngwie, and Satriani. There are obviously other shredders, but those guys are top shelf as far as name recognition and consistent popularity goes. They are like the holy trinity of wankmanship. Of those three, Satriani is by far the most listenable IMO. His wanking still contains riffs and melody. It still sounds like rock music. Yngwie just shreds classical scales all over the place and Vai is frilly and weird.
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Can't say I've listened to a great deal of Yngwie, Vai or Satch. I'm fairly familiar with Vai's Passion and Warfare and Satch's Surfing With The Alien. I can't recall a single melody from a Yngwie song in my head, but everything that uses that diminished minor scale sounds like Yngwie immediately.

Not sure if I prefer Vai or Satch - its like deciding between vomit and diarrhoea. There's one big difference between them both and Yngwie though... when you see them interviewed and talking about guitars, technique and gear on YouTube, Vai and Satch are really helpful and give really good tips for improving your technique, whether that's playing, effects, dialing in an amp or building your rig.

Yngwie seems to even use those YouTube interviews to show everyone how fast he can fly up and down classical scales.
 
JDOD said:
Can't say I've listened to a great deal of Yngwie, Vai or Satch. I'm fairly familiar with Vai's Passion and Warfare and Satch's Surfing With The Alien. I can't recall a single melody from a Yngwie song in my head, but everything that uses that diminished minor scale sounds like Yngwie immediately.

Not sure if I prefer Vai or Satch - its like deciding between vomit and diarrhoea. There's one big difference between them both and Yngwie though... when you see them interviewed and talking about guitars, technique and gear on YouTube, Vai and Satch are really helpful and give really good tips for improving your technique, whether that's playing, effects, dialing in an amp or building your rig.

Yngwie seems to even use those YouTube interviews to show everyone how fast he can fly up and down classical scales.
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Yngwie is a caricature of himself. He totally embraces all aspects of being a cheesy 80s shred god and amps it up a million degrees. He's funny to me, but I'm laughing at him, not with him. He at least has that for me. Satch and Vai offer me nothing. It's all just music for guitar players. I'm more interested in songs. If I'm looking for a guitar hero, I'm more interested in guys that play good within the song and do things I can relate to even if they are way above my pay grade. Slash, Angus, Ace, basic rock lead guitarists. I like them. The frilly shred tools can go climb a wall of dicks.
 
Greg_L said:
Yngwie is a caricature of himself. He totally embraces all aspects of being a cheesy 80s shred god and amps it up a million degrees. He's funny to me, but I'm laughing at him, not with him. He at least has that for me. Satch and Vai offer me nothing. It's all just music for guitar players. I'm more interested in songs. If I'm looking for a guitar hero, I'm more interested in guys that play good within the song and do things I can relate to even if they are way above my pay grade. Slash, Angus, Ace, basic rock lead guitarists. I like them. The frilly shred tools can go climb a wall of dicks.
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You're a long, long way ahead of me in working out how to set your gear up and get recorded sounds that you like though. I listen to a huge variety of videos of people explaining how they get different sounds - it just pops up in my YouTube feed. Vai and Satch seem to have done a lot a of them. I'm not chasing anyone's sound in particular - I'm just looking for things I can try that could help - just more ideas that I might be able to use.

I agree - Yngwie is hilarious - Michael Angelo Batio is another one - he's really funny.
Greg, see if you can get to the end of this without something inside you dying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Np5HkWS7w
 
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