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Yeah, modular is the hot thing right now but you have to really think about what you want to achieve before getting into that. Because it can be a sort of an endless pit of GAS and procrastination. If it fits your musical goals, great. But otherwise, it might be a waste of time/money/productivity for a lot of people...

I've been doing some one man band stuff on the side too. I try to write songs and record them but my solo performances basically become improv shows with bass vi, pedals and Suicide drum machines. I dunno whether to run with that and record the gigs more or actively try to play my written material out? I'm also hoping and praying someone in the audience is moved enough to want to play drums for me...

It's funny though. I've gotten more consistently positive reviews of my solo performances than with my own band it seems. My band is much more song oriented, clear structures in place. Strange to think people would gravitate towards my audial masturbation.

people want new things. as much as i enjoy being in a band, i think you have to be so bloody original or so wholly derivate of another band that it makes them feel "oh my god, this band sound exactly like <insert band here>, IT'S GIVING ME NOSTALGIAAAAAAA", that it's hard to make an impact on people.

SecretMachine wrote:people want new things. as much as i enjoy being in a band, i think you have to be so bloody original or so wholly derivate of another band that it makes them feel "oh my god, this band sound exactly like <insert band here>, IT'S GIVING ME NOSTALGIAAAAAAA", that it's hard to make an impact on people.

pretty much. i mean you can apply that logic to anything musical but bands certainly aren't new.
i think the format and instrumentation holds a lot of people back, too. i'd really like to see more people get out there with weird-ass combinations of instruments from the beginning rather than just substituting one or two into the regular guitar/bass/drum etc format. There's no reason you can't form a sick 3-piece band with someone on modular, someone on guitar and someone on clarinet, for example. The way people learn instruments playing 'normal' band stuff tends to make it difficult for a lot of people to improvise or compose too far outside that format, but it can be done.

Personally i'm not going modular anytime soon and probably never will because for whatever reason with how shit-crazy gear has gotten lately i've been more interested in using the barest possible guitar setup in the weirdest possible contexts, but i hope the people that are diving down that rabbit hole come up with new ways to integrate these things into collaborative and structured projects because there's a lot of promise here for collective musical 'progress'.

It's one of the reasons I have so rarely used percussion, and didn't in solo shows.

It leads people to expect something that (a) I wasn't (b) constrained them to think under the tyranny of a visual timekeeper.

backwardsvoyager wrote:

SecretMachine wrote:people want new things. as much as i enjoy being in a band, i think you have to be so bloody original or so wholly derivate of another band that it makes them feel "oh my god, this band sound exactly like <insert band here>, IT'S GIVING ME NOSTALGIAAAAAAA", that it's hard to make an impact on people.

pretty much. i mean you can apply that logic to anything musical but bands certainly aren't new.
i think the format and instrumentation holds a lot of people back, too. i'd really like to see more people get out there with weird-ass combinations of instruments from the beginning rather than just substituting one or two into the regular guitar/bass/drum etc format. There's no reason you can't form a sick 3-piece band with someone on modular, someone on guitar and someone on clarinet, for example. The way people learn instruments playing 'normal' band stuff tends to make it difficult for a lot of people to improvise or compose too far outside that format, but it can be done.

Personally i'm not going modular anytime soon and probably never will because for whatever reason with how shit-crazy gear has gotten lately i've been more interested in using the barest possible guitar setup in the weirdest possible contexts, but i hope the people that are diving down that rabbit hole come up with new ways to integrate these things into collaborative and structured projects because there's a lot of promise here for collective musical 'progress'.

This is amazingly important I think, and I wish more people thought about it. I love it when bands eschew the "bass, drums and a guitar or two" format, and it's far too rare. I love jamming with an odd combo, because it makes me think and play whatever instrument I'm using in a different way than I would in a "normal" group.

monkeydancer wrote:

backwardsvoyager wrote:

SecretMachine wrote:people want new things. as much as i enjoy being in a band, i think you have to be so bloody original or so wholly derivate of another band that it makes them feel "oh my god, this band sound exactly like <insert band here>, IT'S GIVING ME NOSTALGIAAAAAAA", that it's hard to make an impact on people.

pretty much. i mean you can apply that logic to anything musical but bands certainly aren't new.
i think the format and instrumentation holds a lot of people back, too. i'd really like to see more people get out there with weird-ass combinations of instruments from the beginning rather than just substituting one or two into the regular guitar/bass/drum etc format. There's no reason you can't form a sick 3-piece band with someone on modular, someone on guitar and someone on clarinet, for example. The way people learn instruments playing 'normal' band stuff tends to make it difficult for a lot of people to improvise or compose too far outside that format, but it can be done.

Personally i'm not going modular anytime soon and probably never will because for whatever reason with how shit-crazy gear has gotten lately i've been more interested in using the barest possible guitar setup in the weirdest possible contexts, but i hope the people that are diving down that rabbit hole come up with new ways to integrate these things into collaborative and structured projects because there's a lot of promise here for collective musical 'progress'.

This is amazingly important I think, and I wish more people thought about it. I love it when bands eschew the "bass, drums and a guitar or two" format, and it's far too rare. I love jamming with an odd combo, because it makes me think and play whatever instrument I'm using in a different way than I would in a "normal" group.

I honestly didn't realize how tired I am of the standard guitar, bass, drums bands until I read this

It's because there has been very little deviation from this form since well before most people here were born. Even electronic instruments, which should have been a huge game changer, were largely relegated to "novelty" status in a rock context, and basically used in the most grotesque ways for pop. Not that there hasn't been good electronic music, just talking about guitar based rock derived music.

Hence why a bunch of us ended up doing *anything* but rock music.

Quickest way to *not* be a rock band is to ditch the singer and drummer.

Drums are just so dang engaging though. I've been trying to make a solo thing work and I'm really struggling to make it what I want without a live drummer, which is pretty much out of the question. Making catchy almost ambient near drones is real tricky haha

I hate, hate, hate mechanical drums. I hated the 303 and 808s when you couldn't give 'em away. I found so very few actual drummers worth a spit either.

If you want to just get up and play, they got in the way more often than not and didn't know when to lay back and do nothing (the most important skill for any improv dude IMO).

Canned drummers make me get up and leave a venue faster than anything though.

I never use drums/percussion in my projects (but if I did they would be electronic, and not pretending to be acoustic drums) but I want to jam with these guys:

[youtube]http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=25Rihq0ZwRk[/youtube]

The big problem for me has always been motivation/inspiration, and probably the confidence needed to follow through on an idea. You can have all the gear in the world, and I've got a bunch... nothing really fancy but more than enough to do what I'd want. I tried to start a solo drone thing about a year ago but it only lasted a couple months. Heh, I saw Xiu Xiu open up for Swans a couple years back and as that guy was fiddling with a completely blank expression all I could imagine was him accidentally doing something totally wrong for the set he planned but keeping a straight face because who would know?

How do you get over that hurdle?

Funny. My solo music, drum machines are the only aspect that I feel confident about. The rest is tryna find nice noises and basslines and banging my head against a wall, haven't even bothered to break into chord progressions or melodies yet. It's all synths. Modular excites me because it can do melodic content, but it's also sort of the natural conclusion of electronic-instruments-as-new-musical-possibilities. i don't even know whether some of the things it does even qualify as sound effects anymore. But i do not i am disinterested in three chords and a whatever, and effects, synths, drum machines, modular, et al, they all encourage me to tackle ideas from a different angle. I write almost all of my songs from the drums up these days, and i am tryna push my drum sounds into weirder zones, with samples. Sampled a cat scratching its litter box.

psychic vampire. wrote:Modular excites me because it can do melodic content, but it's also sort of the natural conclusion of electronic-instruments-as-new-musical-possibilities.

It's actually the introduction more than the conclusion .

About bands structure : I don't think I've ever really cared about that. I mean, my main musical bases, i.e. the artists I built a fair share of my appreciation of music on, are Berurier Noir (old french punk band with a drum machine, a guitarist, a singer and sometimes additional stuff like sax, other singers), Ministry and Sonic Youth. I guess I'never really expected bands to be uniform in that way...