Another Musical Instrument Question


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A Thing of Eternity
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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MetaCugel8262 wrote:I think it time for many of us to admit our roots are not in any way singular. It is almost certain that if you are African American or Native American, you carry within you a certain percentage of the European lines, and if you are from old European lines you are likely to have a least a small amount of Native American(like myself). And from a cultural point of view, that and it's American cousin, are the foundation of us all. We are what we are, admit it and move on, because without it, whatever the tragedies involved, none of us would be here now.
:lol: I thought you were a spammer because of the randomness of your post that barely (just barely) touched on the topic at hand and then went off on an odd tangent! EDIT: and of course this post that I'm quoting is completely off topic and random!

Also, I didn't say Indian music was the most technical to play (OR the most complex) - it isn't. I'm saying that no one style gets that prize - western classical went further with harmony and Indian classical went further with melody, in melody and melody alone Indian is more complex than western - technique is taken to the utmost possible extremes in many genres, none more so than the other highly technical genres.

And not sure where you're getting that India is the oldest culture on Earth... that was just a nonsense statement! Not trying to be rude, it just seriously was nonsense. I love all things Indian, but their culture is not the oldest on the planet (we all came from the same area in Africa, we all changed over time... all cultures are equally old if you're talking in those terms).

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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Wait, the more I read the weirder this gets - you said rhythmic music is rooted in polytheism (don't even get me started on what that could possibly mean) and "classical" is rooted in monotheism... but classical music IS rhythmic... so that statement makes no sense.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Yes, India is the oldest culture on Earth, a fact, not an opinion. European bias and Orientalism has hidden this truth from us all. There was nothing random about what I wrote. I combined politics, occupy wallstreet and Dune, what's random about that? Just because you don't know it, doesn't mean it is so. Also, when all those terrible people leave, are you going back to your nice warm house, TV and computer, or are you going to go back for real? Otherwise, that would be cheating.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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No, classical is not rythmic. There isn't even a drum beat. It is melodic...a huge difference. Classical music comes from monotheistic Europe, rythmic music is rooted in polytheistic Africa. Not complicated. Makes perfect sense.
The play of words can lead to certain expectations which life is unable to match. This is a source of much insanity and other forms of unhappiness...-Wreave Saying: Whipping Star
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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God Damn it meta, I'd Fucking slap you if you were within my reach right now.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Why, the truth hurt? Instead of name calling, make an accurate argument against what I wrote. I bet you can't. Sorry to disturb your church of the politically "correct" nonsense.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Who called you a name? I just want to slap you because I want to. Ok?
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Read my signature. It's a really good book by the master this discussion board is dedicated to.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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This would make perfect sense, for not only is India the most ancient culture on earth, but it is the birth of the only religious systems and philosophies that are perfectly condusive and in line with modern quantum physics.
Curious. How do you handle the fact that quantum mechanics, in its bare form, has no strict interpretation?
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Stack of turtles. :crazy:
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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A Thing of Eternity wrote:
Freakzilla wrote:The good thing about it though, if you can learn to play on a classical, a standard acoustic and much more so and electric will be a relative piece of cake.
I think the opposite, because I think classical is the easiest, though almost tied with electric really.
I think it depends on what you learned on. I have mandolins with radiused fretboards and others with flat ones. I learned on a flat one, but now use radiused ones as much as I can because I personally prefer them. But Ive noticed that when I play one or the other for a while, it's hard for a few days to go back to the other.

That being said, they do appear to have their different applications. Flat fretboards are found on mandolins intended for folk, celtic, traditional, old time, etc kinds of music (non bluegrass, basically). Radiused fretboards are found on mandolins intended for bluegrass, rock, pop, etc. Can't remember about classical though. Probably flat. I doubt this has anything to do with sound though. That is more related to bluegrass mandolins having arched tops, arched backs, no virzis, etc. Probalby more to tradition. Bill Monroe, who invented BG, played a Gibson F5, which had a radiused fretboard.
A Thing of Eternity wrote:Not sure what to make of this... it's definitely one of the most complex if not THE most complex in one specific way, but no it's not in any way more technical to play than Jazz or Indian Classical for example... amongst many other genres.There are many many genres that have pushed technical playing to the limits of human capability.

It's only the most complex in terms of stacking melodies and harmonies - from a purely melodic point of view classical Indian is FAR more complex (FAR) and from a rhythmic point of view there are numerous styles that are more complex, some from parts of Africa emply rhythms so far beyond those used in classical that it's almost silly to compare them.

Am I just arguing with a spammer? EDIT: Nope, your other post is Dune related in a very whacky way...

ANYWAYS my point was that of the three styles of guitar (not styles of PLAYING guitar, styles of guitars themselves) classical accoustic is in my opinion the easiest to play for a beginner, though electric is damned close.
You ever watched a really good classical musician perform a piece more than once? They seem to work on getting the motions of playing the thing down pat, whereas non-classical performers pay more attention to just playing the piece.
Crysknife wrote:
MetaCugel8262 wrote:You have in some ways only affirmed my original point. Yes, Indian music such as sitar music, is the most complex and difficult to play...and it is also a perfect synthesis of the two polar aspects of music...technique and rules, combined with free flowing rythmn. This would make perfect sense, for not only is India the most ancient culture on earth, but it is the birth of the only religious systems and philosophies that are perfectly condusive and in line with modern quantum physics. Hinduism combines and unites polytheism and monotheism, they exist side by side, yet there is no contradiction, for all is Brahman...the many and the One. Whereas rythmic music is rooted in strict polytheism, and classical music is rooted in strict monotheism.
RHN, is that u? :wink:
:D My thoughts exactly.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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That's the point, Eastern spiritutal systems like Buddhism, Taosim and Hinduism have many different schools of thought and have no strict interpretations, and they are always flowing and changing with the times.
Last edited by MetaCugel8262 on 09 Dec 2011 14:51, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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:doh:
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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And don't take words literlly, because then you miss the whole point. "Turtles" were meant for the understanding of primitive listeners, and for the more sophisticated student or guru, they in fact represented "Worlds, or "dimensions", or "realitites", or Universes...as in the Multiverse. See, you're not so clever after all are you.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Language is a kind of code dependant upon the life rythms of the species which originated the language. Unless you learn those rythms, the code remains unintelligible. Whipping Star
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Posting from RoadRunner in VA. Not Wales. Hmmmm. Perhaps the dolphins have started talking to a new medium?
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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MetaCugel8262 wrote:See, you're not so clever after all are you.
Is that directed at me?
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Omph - I'm not saying classical musicians don't have insane technique - I'm just saying other genres keep up just fine, I've heard advanced prog musicians play with the same amount of precision and repeatability before. I will concede that classical is the genre that shows the most of this specific aspect of technique though, something like jazz is a little different in that the players don't want to play it identically twice - if they chose to I have no doubt that they are more than able to though. If metal musicians can do it I can't see jazzers not being able to. :wink:

MetaCugel8262 wrote:No, classical is not rythmic. There isn't even a drum beat. It is melodic...a huge difference. Classical music comes from monotheistic Europe, rythmic music is rooted in polytheistic Africa. Not complicated. Makes perfect sense.
YES it IS rhythmic! Just because there is no drum beat doesn't mean there is no rhythm you goof! Every time a violin plays anything at all in classical there is a rhythm to it, same with every other instrument at every other time in classical.

ALL music aside from a few modern experimental styles are rhythmic.

I think you have the wrong definition of rhythmic in your head. You seem to think it means a stead drum beat, but it absolutely does not. Go listen to some classical music and tap your foot along with it - no problem at all. The rhythm changes often, slows down speeds up, changes suddenly, changes time signature - but it HAS RHYTHM.

I'm sorry, you just simply don't know what you're talking about.

EDIT: thought of a perfect example for you of a classical piece that not only is obviously rhythmic, the rhythm is actuall almost as simple and basic as rhythm gets, at the beginning of the piece anyways. Fur Elise - the beginning is a straigh 1/8th note progression with occasional 1/8th notes left out to create pauses.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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I'd say if you can put a time signature to it, it's rythmic, huh?
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Pig headed I call this one. Do some research outiside of your biases...you know, before we all leave so you can throw away all your evil and comfortable Western influences and get back to living the way it was before. ;)
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Melodic Imitation is a term that covers various genres of non-classical music which are primarily characterised by the dominance of a single strong melody line. Rhythm, tempo and beat are subordinate to the melody line or tune, which is generally easily memorable, and followed without great difficulty. Melodic music is found in all parts of the world, overlapping many genres, and may be performed by a singer or orchestra, or a combination of the two.

The fundamental principles and structural norms of melodic music were established in what is sometimes known as the Common practice period, dating from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Melodic music tends to have a consistent metre, pulse and tempo, things that are far less emphasised in contemporary music.

In the west, melodic music has developed largely from folk song sources, and been heavily influenced by classical music in its development and orchestration. In many areas the border line between classical and melodic popular music is imprecise. Opera is generally considered to be a classical form. The lighter operetta is considered borderline, whilst stage and film musicals and musical comedy are firmly placed in the popular melodic category. The reasons for much of this are largely historical.

Other major categories of melodic music include music hall and vaudeville, which, along with the ballad, grew out of European folk music. Orchestral dance music developed from localised forms such as the jig, polka and waltz, but with the admixture of Latin American, blues and ragtime influences, it diversified into countless sub-genres such as big band, cabaret and Swing. More specialised forms of melodic music include military music and religious music.

Traditional pop music overlaps a number of these categories: big band music and musical comedy, for example, are closely allied to traditional pop.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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MetaCugel8262 wrote:Yes, India is the oldest culture on Earth, a fact, not an opinion. European bias and Orientalism has hidden this truth from us all. There was nothing random about what I wrote. I combined politics, occupy wallstreet and Dune, what's random about that? Just because you don't know it, doesn't mean it is so. Also, when all those terrible people leave, are you going back to your nice warm house, TV and computer, or are you going to go back for real? Otherwise, that would be cheating.
The randomness of it was that until then this was a discussion about specific types of guitars, and then you involved all those other topics out of the blue, there was no progression of the discussion, it just happened all of a sudden and those aspects of your posts were completely off topic in an odd way.

What terrible people? Go back from where?

And on the topic of India - I'm not speaking from European bias, I'm saying that Africa is where we all started, all our cultures have changed since many of our peoples left Africa, but cultures don't just end or keep going. They change. Indian culture has no distinct starting point (no culture does unless we talk about human culture as one whole), so to say it is older is a nonsense statement. All people on this planet have had their culture evolve from the same root culture, there is no distinct point where people suddenly became Indian or European from a culture point of view.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός—rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry"[1]) may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions."[2] This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years.

In the performance arts rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale; of musical sounds and silences, of the steps of a dance, or the meter of spoken language and poetry. Rhythm may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space."[3] and a common language of pattern unites rhythm with geometry. In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. Recent work in these areas includes books by Maury Yeston,[4] Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, Jonathan Kramer, Christopher Hasty,[5] William Rothstein and Joel Lester.

Rhythm is made up of sounds and silences. These sound and silences are put together to form a patterns of sounds which are repeated to create a rhythm. A rhythm has a steady beat, but it may also have different kinds of beats. Some beats may be stronger, longer, shorter or softer than others. In a single piece of music, a composer can use many different rhythms.

African music

In the Griot tradition of Africa everything related to music has been passed on orally. Babatunde Olatunji (1927–2003), a Nigerian drummer who lived and worked in the United States, developed a simple series of spoken sounds for teaching the rhythms of the hand drum. He used six vocal sounds: Goon Doon Go Do Pa Ta. There are three basic sounds on the drum, but each can be played with either the left or the right hand. This simple system is now used worldwide, particularly by Djembe players.

It is noteworthy that the debate about the appropriateness of staff notation for African music is a subject of particular interest to outsiders, not insiders. African scholars from Kyagambiddwa to Kongo have for the most part accepted the conventions—and limitations—of staff notation and gone on to produce transcriptions in order to inform and to make possible a higher level of discussion and debate.— Agawu (2003: 52)[26]

John Miller Chernoff 1979 has argued that West African music is based on tension between rhythms. This tension between rhythms is called polyrhythms and is created by the simultaneous sounding of two or more different rhythms. Often there is a dominant rhythm interacting with an independent competing rhythm, or rhythms. These often oppose or compliment each other and combine freely with the dominant rhythm creating a rich rhythmic texture not limited to any one set meter or tempo.

A set of moral values underpins a full musical system based on repetition of relatively simple patterns which meet at distant cross-rhythmic intervals and call and answer schemes. Values also show up in collective utterances such as proverbs or lineages appear either in phrases that translate as drum talk or in the words of songs. People expect musicians to stimulate participation of all present, notably by reacting to people dancing the music. Appreciation of musicians is related to the effectiveness of their upholding community values.[27]
Indian music has also been passed on orally. Tabla players would learn to speak complex rhythm patterns and phrases before attempting to play them. Sheila Chandra, an English pop singer of Indian descent, made performances based on her singing these patterns. In Indian Classical music, the Tala of a composition is the rhythmic pattern over which the whole piece is structured.

In the 20th century, composers like Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich wrote more rhythmically complex music using odd meters, and techniques such as phasing and additive rhythm. At the same time, modernists such as Olivier Messiaen and his pupils used increased complexity to disrupt the sense of a regular beat, leading eventually to the widespread use of irrational rhythms in New Complexity. This use may be explained by a comment of John Cage's where he notes that regular rhythms cause sounds to be heard as a group rather than individually; the irregular rhythms highlight the rapidly changing pitch relationships that would otherwise be subsumed into irrelevant rhythmic groupings.[28] LaMonte Young also wrote music in which the sense of a regular beat is absent because the music consists only of long sustained tones (drones). In the 1930s, Henry Cowell wrote music involving multiple simultaneous periodic rhythms and collaborated with Léon Thérémin to invent the Rhythmicon, the first electronic rhythm machine, in order to perform them. Similarly, Conlon Nancarrow wrote for the player piano.

Use of polyrhythms in American music is generally traced to the influence of black culture through Dixieland and Jazz styles. The effect of multiple soloing in these forms, often utilizing cross-rhythms comes directly from the underlying aesthetics of sub-Saharan African music. These complex rhythmic structures have been widely adopted in many current forms of western popular music.
A side note, during his time, Igor Stravinsky was considered untraditional and even radical. Some of his contemporary classical critics even attacked him for his radical break with classical music norms.
Last edited by MetaCugel8262 on 09 Dec 2011 15:21, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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MetaCugel8262 wrote:Pig headed I call this one. Do some research outiside of your biases...you know, before we all leave so you can throw away all your evil and comfortable Western influences and get back to living the way it was before. ;)
Nobody is stopping you from leaving.
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Re: Another Musical Instrument Question

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Why? I'm enjoying this. I could ask you the same question.
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