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Sloths over Ethiopia 0055
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Sloths over Ethiopia #0055 $ July 11, 1999
Sloths over Ethiopia is now part of Westphalia Enterprises
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Our readers will recall that in Sloths over Ethiopia #0054 we began a series
on major issues in keyboarding playing. We left off in the middle of a rant
by Swedish keyboardist Jens Johansson about what he fucking hates in today's
keyboarding world.
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* using
- weak (or no!) melodic ideas
- weak rhythmic ideas, or NO rhythmic ideas
Whatever happened to ideational content!? What the fuck!? Has the whole
world gone mad!? Some advice: Let your ears do the thinking for you, not
your fingers. If your mind and ears are not clear on what your actually
playing, but your fingers are, chances are you're what is known in
technical parlance as "a wanker". Muscle memory has its place, of course,
in the hands of some lunatic (Yngwie or Shawn Lane, say) that's actually
bothered to practice more than, say, five lame finger patterns. On
keyboards, there's really no mechanical limit on how fast to press the
keys down in sequence. But which keys? Therein lies the rub. Anyway, the
speed issue leads me to:
* I'm sick of people trying to play 20 notes/second without getting the
joke (the mechanics of the cochlea has the last laugh on you!) (When I
talk about 20 notes/sec I'm talking sequentially or "horizontally", here,
of course) ...it just becomes a blur.
* Horrible lead synth sounds. What's this about spectral content? Do we
need harmonics in the range above 8 kHz? Are a lot of dogs going to
listen to your solos? No idea what I'm talking about? Listen carefully to
some real instruments. (If you've had to mix a record or two, things
become clearer, in both senses!)
* Using a sequencer and passing it off as a real playing. Please! I'm sick
of it! You're not fooling anyone! This joke died in 1985. It was replaced
by this, much funnier, one: "Q: how many keyboard players does it take to
screw in a light bulb? A: None! They have machines that do that
nowadays." As someone who built my first (software based) sequencer in
1981, I should know this: fiddling with your solos is a dead end. You
won't be any happier. And neither will the poor listeners. And you won't
be fooling anyone. Hey, least of all me.
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The conclusion to Mr. Johansson's rant and a response by
another famed musician appear in Sloths over Ethiopia #0056.
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Sloths over Ethiopia #0055 $ July 11, 1999
Sloths over Ethiopia is now part of Westphalia Enterprises
www.jobbers.org/Soe -- coming soon
Visit our temporary web home at at eat.ourfamily.com
Sloths over Ethiopia has been made potable by the life of Soe Myint Naing.
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