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What led to the death of Rock?


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2 hours ago, ZR said:

John Travolta was in Grease? I only remember Oilivia 💘😍 And, to make sure I wouldn't forget her I had her poster on the wall! The one from the movie in her black leather bad girl outfit. Yes, next to Heather Thomas and  Farrah Fawcett (even though I preferred Jaclyn Smith as my angel).

This is what I liked by Olivia Newton John:

I discovered this much later in the 90's, because she had a great band there. Buzz Feiten, Robert Popwell, Michael Landau, Tom Scott, Carlos Vega. I knew most of her hits from the 80's. She was great looking then. I was more open to the 80's artists and music when the 90's came. Not only did I dislike the grunge and alternative scene, as well a rap, but here in Germany the Euro dance scene and the techno scene got quite big. It was the older bands I followed in the 90's, like RHCP, Fishbone, Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, Faith no More, Living Color, and older dinosaurs like ELP and King Crimson regrouped then, Toto did rock far more than before. Sting got my interest as he had a fantastic band then... there were always possibilities to escape the stuff I didn't like and yet still be in line with contemporary music. Nowadays, there is not much I like, but I like stuff like Winery Dogs, Richie Kotzen, Paul Carrack's recent stuff, Joe Bonamassa, Doyle Bramhall II, Vintage Trouble, Gov't Mule, most of them them like dinosaurs themselves compared to younger bands.
And yes, it was cool that we had the chance to listen to all that diverse music. Even festivals had acts of diverse genres then. And for me there is even the jazzy stuff from the 50's and 60's to discover, even classical music and film scores.

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What he describes is somewhat eye opening for me.  I have always had issues creating drum parts, because I absolutely suck at drums and the tools I have to create them are cumbersome and mechanical at best.  His point regarding groove is dead on.  The beat not being locked to the grid definitely changes the feel of the song.  Led Zeppelin seemed to avoid the grid altogether.  Sometimes to the degree that it sounded out of time.  

To say it has ruined rock and roll, I don't know.  I personally think the cell phone has played a bigger role in the decline of entertainment altogether, not just music.

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That's all well and good But you don't have to snap to grid when you record on a DAW. The only thing on my recordings that sounds like a drum machine is the drum machine. Everything else we just wing it.

A Roland DR-5 drum machine sounds very real. The only thing is that it is as precise as your gonna get. So unless you waste your time quantizing You can still make good ol' rock and roll.Just sounds like you have a good drummer. And that's what everybody wants anyway. My DR -5 has a few swing beats which I've used in the past.  I use it in 1 song as the drums for the bridge. This tune is as sloppy as anything else But it sounds better not quantized I think. Like most shit does. 

I'm not using my DR-5 on this tune. I'm using a program off my Digitech RP 355 foot pedal. This is one of our first tunes. Even before i had a DR-5

That's one of the coolest things about a guitar. A lot of it is impossible to quantize, only 2  rules ( which I like )  stay in tune and stay in time. Anything else just go for it man.

https://soundcloud.com/william-shreve-763578158/its-always-love-20

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Great video. While he stresses how the tools work, he doesn't connect the dots very well to reach his conclusion. What I think he's trying to say is that over-quantization takes the music out of the hands of the musicians and gives it to the producers. The music companies have a "sound" they want to sell, and the tools let the producers cut and paste whatever the musicians actually play and process it into this sound. It's all about control. The side effect is that in order to give the producers the ability to micro-arrange each recording, everything has to align to a grid, which sucks the groove out of the track.Perfectly quantized music gets very boring very quickly. All of the feel of real musicians responding to each other emotionally based on the energy in the room is removed.

My favorite music swings. Sure, quantization tools have swing settings, but, you know, it don't mean a thing, because quantized swing ain't got it. Isn't that what Duke Ellington said 70+ years ago?

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Years ago I heard Robert Klein doing a radio interview with Tim Curry (yeah, that Tim Curry), talking about his latest album. Curry gave a great explanation and demonstration of how you make a straight beat more interesting by "leaning on it," as he called it. Wish I could find that clip. Anyway, what the video in the original post shows is how real musicians lean on the beat, either by leading the beat or lagging behind it. Sometimes both are going on simultaneously, as he showed, where the kick more or less stays on the beat while some snare hits lead it and the ride cymbal lags. Yeah, the math doesn't add up, but it sounds great. It just makes the track really hard to manipulate. The video shows how the tools take all that wonderful inaccuracy out of the track so music can become a commodity.

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On 7/23/2019 at 6:47 AM, ZR said:

John Travolta was in Grease? I only remember Oilivia 💘😍 And, to make sure I wouldn't forget her I had her poster on the wall! The one from the movie in her black leather bad girl outfit. Yes, next to Heather Thomas and  Farrah Fawcett (even though I preferred Jaclyn Smith as my angel).

And, in regards to those k-teI  records ... I actually believe that the wide variety of music most of us older cats were exposed to back then was a great thing; musically and societally. 

We would often listen to a wide variety of music on trips in the car with my parents in the 70s. It would go from Ray Charles, Steve Miller, Lawrence Welk, ABBA, soul, classical, Linda Ronstadt 😍, Donna Summer, gospel, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Kenny Rogers, old AM radio hits whatever. On TV it was Sonny and Cher, Hee Haw, American Bandstand, Soul Train, Lawrence Welk to the late night rock concerts like cheap trick etc. Total variety!

Societally, it seemed to give everybody something more in common that we ALL could relate to, some common ground.

Nowadays (that's an old folks word!), everything is so divided and sub-divided that everyone is just into their own little world. 

This is true...those Ronco & K-Tel 8tracks had everything on them. Some of it most excellent. I remember those exact car trips running those variety  8 tracks too....

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The first thing I do when recording is stop snap to grid. Even when I record my sucky drum parts I try to PLAY and not just record a part....so there is push and pull with the groove. For me, the rhythm guitar leads the way....probably a Stones thing.

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I agree totally about the drum thing, unfortunately I don't have a drummer on line only a drum machine. But perfect drums do sound ok. Everything else is out of time half or most of the time. It is possible to play right exactly with the beat, But it makes it sound like a machine or computer controlled. Takes all the emotion out of it I think

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I read a Dwight Yoakum quote where he said a producer was trying to get some breathing noises out of a track and wanted to cut and paste his vocals. Yoakum said something to the effect of “Don’t take away my perfect imperfections. That’s what makes it human.”

I get it. Making things too perfect makes it sound too fake or too programmed.

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My first album was a K--Tel record (the album collection was titled, "Believe In Music" with the song of the same name) from either Thrifty Drug Store or TG&Y. It did have a variety of songs and some not-big-hits. I played that album to death. Whats interesting was that, as a kid, I wasn't familiar with bands or who really sang what, plus MTV wasn't around and I never knew what the artists looked like or who they really were. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized who many of the bands on that record were. One of the songs was  by Ricky Springfield, which was weird because my mom would watch him on General Hospital and I didn't even know this guy on a soap opera was also a singer on that old K-Tel record. I think my favorite song from that record was "Brandy", which I hear all the time now because of it being on the second Guardians of the Galaxy film. 

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This guy is wrong.  Period.

Rock music was going-places in the 1990s, and then the 'hot chicks' started making their own music - to dance-to.  Brittney, Christina, Taylor, Gwen, Katy, etc. 

Meanwhile, 'rock' started to mellow-out - less grunge/punk, more Matchbox 20-lite.  European techno/trance/dub started to get airplay here.  The 'party-place' to rebel and hang-out was a RAVE, not a rock concert.  Dance music, drugs, and girls became a 'thing'....not a guitar in sight. 

Once Emo hit, 'Rock' was for sad losers who needed an album's worth of songs to tell us all how lonely they were and how bad they felt.  The Warped Tour gave every crybaby-band a stage to weep into a microphone and 'emote' about nothing.  An entire genre of music became utterly disposable, or at-worst a marketing tool for Chinese-made sneakers.  The 'Slipknot' segment of 90s Rock went off the deep-end - multiple/odd timing-changes, ultra-distorted sludge riffs, and unintelligible cookie-monster scream-vocals whose lyrics are about....nothing.  Its laughable and sad. 

I bought a ticket to the Sad Summer Festival here in Worcester - it could have been billed as "Warped Tour Lite".  Attendance was great for 90-degree heat in a massive parking lot, but the bands....sheesh, Rock was in-trouble!  Most were indistinguishable from the next, and in the crowd that was there, I saw 'maybe' three people over-30 that gave this 'newer' version of Rock the time-of-day.  We need another "Sex Pistols moment"....now!

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HATE whiny-guy Emo music, it's the surest way to make me tune out.

Drum machines aren't all bad...especially if you treat them like an instrument instead of a substitute for musicianship, and do things to them like plug in guitar effects pedals (something that wasn't supposed to be done, like so many other things in the history of Rawk), like this guy did:

https://reverb.com/news/prince-and-the-linn-lm-1

Having technology is all very well, but relying on it too much and using it as a crutch instead of a tool sucks the soul out of the performance, like what was said above.

I'd rather listen to something loose and funky like Vintage Trouble, or lo-fi stuff like Guided By Voices:

 

 

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I agree that the tools to make things "perfect" don't do the music any favors.  IMHO what also is killing rock:

1. Corporate radio

2. Shitty music being everywhere, good music like a needle in a haystack

3. Kids (probably people in general actually) being tricked into thinking something is good due to hearing it repetitiously.  It's not good, it's just familiar because you've heard it 10,000 times!

4. People entering the music business to get famous rather than wanting to be musicians, and record labels signing "packages", not real bands/artists

5. Other genres taking huge chunks of the market.  In some cases, you'll find a person who genuinely likes hip hop or EDM AND rock, but it's not the norm.

6. The lack of mystery aka the internet.  You can find out the bass player's favorite color and the singer's shoe size in about a minute these days.  I actually miss the days when DJ's knew more about the bands than I did, and I got what little information I could from monthly magazines and looking at album cover art, liner notes, and lyrics.

7. Fucking modern country, an abomination IMO.  Bad hair metal with a fiddle or a banjo added and sung with a drawl.  To a lot of people that IS rock these days and that's sad.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, tommy p said:

7. Fucking modern country, an abomination IMO.  Bad hair metal with a fiddle or a banjo added and sung with a drawl.  To a lot of people that IS rock these days and that's sad.

 

 

This^^^^^. You forgot" pretty singers who would starve to death without autotune."

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19 hours ago, crunchee said:

I'd rather listen to something loose and funky like Vintage Trouble, or lo-fi stuff like Guided By Voices:

 

I am lucky that Vintage Trouble are touring Europe frequently.

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The death of rock? Old age.

I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to my parent's music, as good as it might have been. My Dad was an incredible accordion player and his band was pretty popular in the area. Key word: accordion. It was once the most popular instrument to learn. But it was a backbreaker, wasn't easy to do well, and defined HIS generation.

It's no different with guitar now - once the most popular instrument to learn, but cumbersome and difficult to do well compared to the small pushbutton boxes that are everywhere now. Any 3-year-old can make 'music' with one and - this is the biggest thing - become an overnight Youtube sensation. No work, no sweat, and no appreciation for music as WE know it. But one of them is (or will be) the Jimi Hendrix of button-pushing.

We had a pretty good run, but guitar rock is passé.

 

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I really liked the Raw sound of Jet’s Get Born album... but then they hit the shitter! They recorded that on a analog console to tape... it sounds that way too!! Lively and punchy like a rock band should!!

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Until someone pries my Van Halen albums from my cold, dead hands, rock ain't dead in my house, and neither is the electric guitar.

Now get off my lawn as I crank my amp!

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On ‎7‎/‎22‎/‎2019 at 11:34 PM, sonic1974 said:

It's all bullshit, plenty of awesome music and specifically rock being made. Just have to dig around a bit and not expect stuff to sound exactly like it did in any given specific era. 

I agree.  My son turns me on to some great new stuff.  I don't care what moniker the genre is given.  It's rock.  Some of it is horrible, but every generation needs it's own duds.  I hated Nazereth, Saxon, Motorhead and many others.  Just didn't hang with UFO, Scorps, Thin Lizzy, Gary Moore, etc.  And I had to watch my cash flow back then too.  Everyone has their "hierarchy" of artists.

"Dead"?  Not hardly.

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This may explain why I feel so much music today is "manufactured" sounding. I mean, I like halestorm, but their music from a few years back was just like their image: completely perfect and photoshopped. I hate the sound of "over-produced" music. And this is coming from a RUSH fan.  The technology now allows almost infinite tweaking, but I do feel it's sucked the life out of a lot of things.

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