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how do you make weird noises?

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#81
Originally posted by Bruce Lindfield


Well I suspect this is the worst example and I know from exprience that a lot of aspiring musicians when they're younger, spend a lot of time messing about with effects in their bedroom and then regret later that they weren't actualy learning about music and playing. OK you can waste your time how you want - as long as you realise this is what you're doing!
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Ok, I will admit that I am guilty of "wasting my time". I spend a lot of time with my bass when I am at hoime, which is most of my hours when I am not home. I do sit there, play around with my chorus pedal, make wierd sounds with that, p[lay around with my wah pedal, and I even aim TV remotes at my pickups to make the wierd beeps and swooshes.

But I only do that some of the time. I spend most of the time, probably around 70%-80% of my time actually practicing. Wether that be scales, rhythmic study, learning songs, or making songs. I spend a lot of time actually playing bass, actually learning what I need to learn.

And I do agree with you on your point. It is a waste of time if all you do is play around with wierd noises and not spend the time learning to be a better bassist. That is a waste of time.
 
#83
damn. i can't believe this cat is so opposed to noise. if you don't like it... then fine. we get it already. some people do pay money to see noise acts. some people don't. hell, some people wouldn't pay money to see the flecktones. to each his own.

on a side note. my remote controls must suck. all i got out of any of them was a repetitive clicking. and to qualify my actions here's my disclaimer: i spent 8 hours in rehearsal yesterday, a grand total of thirty seconds were spent trying out the remote thing.
 
#84
I would pay to see Radiohead or Sigur Ros make wierd noises for their own gratification. I'm sure I would enjoy Tom Morello make wierd noises in the heat of a RATM gig. I wouldn't touch a Flecktones gig, being entirely uninterested in either their music or Mr Wooten's bass chops.


Hey Bruce, what gives?

You seem more interested in dismissing an entire spectrum of sound possibilities that many people have built entire careers on as "messing around in your bedroom with cheap effects or trying to make a sound like an elephant!!" or "silly noises" than trying to understand where other people are coming from. You also seem convinced that people are necessarily going to split into two camps; good little muffins who play root notes with their fingers just like St Fender intended, and hedonistic sonic scum who are only interested in elephant noises and "their own gratification" and should be shunted off to sampler/synth technology where they won't contaminate the fine bass tradition of doing exactly what you are expected to.

All right, that's a caricature. :)

Similarly, you have yet to make a single comment in this thread that admits the possibility of using unconventional noise within a musical (diatonic, melodic, rythmic) framework to try and make music that is more emotional and expressive, or more striking and beautiful. According to your first post here, you don't even understand why someone would want to do such a thing. According to your later posts, it's a waste of time, or something to be done only on other instruments.

I'm also less than impressed with your classification of bass music into
a) Stuff that should be played on synth.
b) Stuff which can be played on bass.
c) Elephant noises et al.
which seems to me to betray a crisis of the imagination.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that you aren't interested in elephant noises or other people's attempt to materialise the sonic beauty in their head, but don't you think your feelings about whether it's a useful thing to do simply aren't relevant?
 
#87
Originally posted by Bruce Lindfield



Well yes, but that doesn't need to involve making silly noises!! There are loads of musical ideas I haven't explored yet and others like serial or 12-tone row music that I have played in the past where I have only scratched the surface.

There are huge amounts of African musical styles and rhythms that I haven't got round to studying; European folk musics and when I was in Greece I noticed that their traditional dances were all in unusual time signatures, Gamelan music, Indian Scales and improvisation, Japanese classical music...

So much music to study and understand and people are just making silly noises!!





I bought my bass(es) after extensive seaches for one with the best tone I could find - I paid a lot of money - I really like that tone, I really like playing bass.

My view is that if you are interested in making noise then you shoudn't be a bass player - you should be an effects man for movies or a synth player.,,, etc etc

Playing bass is 99.9% about music and getting a good groove, nicely-shaped solo etc. - using your hands to get a good sound. If I was really into weird noises - then I wouldn't be playing bass - as I say It would much easier and more productive if I chose samplers/synthesisers/digital music production - like IRCAM in France.

Basses are designed with music in mind - it just seems perverse to use it for another purpose - why not buy the right tool for the job?





I'd try anything once - but wouldn't devote much time to it - I like music - and as I say if I was going to try avant-garde or noise music, then I would use a synth/digital music production facility not a bass!!

But the main point is that I started playing bass because I like the sound of the bass and wanted to do that - my feeling is that a lot of people round her aren't really bass players as such - but rather are just bored and playing with toys - much as they would with their PC games, PlayStation etc etc.

I aspire to be considered a good musician - not the maker of "most cool-sounding noise" ! :rolleyes:
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#88
Originally posted by Bruce Lindfield

No, the question is : why on earth would you want to make weird noises? ;)
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I wonder, Bruce, did you pose this question to Steve Lawson at his bass centre Clinic which you attended?

I seem to recall a fair amount of what might be termed "weird noises" from use of an Ebow (eg. "drifting"), pitchshifting, reverse and other effects etc. on his solo album.

:rolleyes:
 
#89
Originally posted by The Mock Turtle Regulator


I wonder, Bruce, did you pose this question to Steve Lawson at his bass centre Clinic which you attended?

I seem to recall a fair amount of what might be termed "weird noises" from use of an Ebow (eg. "drifting"), pitchshifting, reverse and other effects etc. on his solo album.

:rolleyes:
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Not at all - everything I heard at the clinic was very much "music" and not "noise" - everything was informed with musical sensibility.

I was pushed for time to get back to Brighton but Steve and I have had debates on here before about effects vs acoustic purism and he knows I am an acoustic purist by preference, although I find what he and Michael Manring do, very musical.

I was very tempted to ask a question at the point where Steve said (jokingly) that he couldn't see why Michael expended so much effort to play "all of a tune" at once - that is, chords as well as melody.

Steve said it was much easier just to use loops . I was tempted to say at that point - well why bother to use a bass, wouldn't it be easier to use a synthesiser/sequencer or digital workstation etc etc ?

But the moment passed and it was too complex to come back to....I may remind him of this comment in his forum later on ! ;)
 
#90
Bruce, your points all address your own musical tastes and tendencies. That's fine, but the fact that you've chosen a musical path which excludes some things which others may wish to embrace is only that; a fact about Bruce Lindfield. It's not an argument for abandoning anything. It's not an argument at all.

...everything was informed with musical sensibility...
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So wierd noises are OK, as long as they are informed with musical sensibility? :)

I don't think we have anything at all to argue about, if that's how you feel. You seem to have arrived at conceptions of what "wierd noise" is that are entirely different to mine, and probably to those of the originator of this thread.

When I think "wierd noise" in the context of a music discussion forum - as opposed to a natural history class where I would expect to hear talk of elephant noises :p - what comes to mind is soundscapes, unusual use of reverb and delay to create texture, notes shaped oddly in the tonal sense, sounds growing and morphing over time, adventurous harmonic feedback, reversed and treated sounds, and so on.

In other words, very musically useful sound - stuff you could layer over the top of a slow ballad and have work musically. Or over the top of a demoniacal rock breakdown - let me cite Radiohead's Bulletproof and the end of the Smashing Pumpkins' Silverf*** as respective examples.

I think you might call that music, Bruce, and I'm pretty sure that it's the sort of thing our thread instigatee Stu Hamm Rules had in mind, too, whatever the semantics may be.

Basses are designed with music in mind - it just seems perverse to use it for another purpose - why not buy the right tool for the job?
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I might answer that by pointing to a Mr James Marshall Hendrix. He made ALL kinds of sound with a more or less stock Fender Strat and a big amp - squeals, moans, airplane noise, wierd bubbly things, beautiful floating soundscapes - sometimes in the same song. Why didn't he just pick up a synth?

Because the guitar-plus-amp WAS the right tool for the job, for him, and thankfully as a result we have some crazy, fascinating, totally human music to listen to which certainly doesn't conform to what a guitar had being used for until then.

Why not do the same thing with bass? "Because St Leo didn't intend us to back in the 50's" doesn't seem to cut it as a reason, for me. :p



Incidentally, elephant acoustics are completely fascinating. They have an assortment of loud "regular" calls and also produce sound in the subsonic frequency range - these subsonic calls are designed to travel well by refraction through the evening or morning atmosphere. They can be heard many kilometers away - if you are an elephant. :)
 
#91
Originally posted by BehindTheMoon
I might answer that by pointing to a Mr James Marshall Hendrix. He made ALL kinds of sound with a more or less stock Fender Strat and a big amp - squeals, moans, airplane noise, wierd bubbly things, beautiful floating soundscapes - sometimes in the same song. Why didn't he just pick up a synth?
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Because they weren't available in 1967??!! ;)
 
#92
Elephants use infrasound which is lower than can be detected by the human ear.

Is everyone having fun? I seem to remember that the question was 'how' not 'why' or 'should I'.

Having been subjected to many musicians running through their standard chops at Music Live on Saturday makes the 'weird noise' debate more relevant for me.

Hearing something different or unusual in (or deliberately out of) context is prefereable to slap riffs in E or sloppy rehashes of others playing.
 
#93
:)

But they certainly were by late 1970. Or if you like, I could point to Eddie Van Halen, or Steve Vai (niether player to my taste, I admit).

Besides, the point is moot - Hendrix's manipulation of sound was based on an instrument which was designed to play nothing of the sort, whereas the synth was specifically designed to make unusual or unavailable sounds.

What something was designed for should be irrelevant. What it can do is more interesting, and if a bass can be persuaded to make beautiful unbasslike sounds in the service of making better music, I'm all for it.
 
#97
Bruce,

Listen to "jesus gonna be here" by Tom Waits. Damn primitive, ugly, messy and dirty. Yet, it`s music at it`s finest to me.

Listen to Einstruezende Neubaten (btw - their leader also plays guitar in the bad seeds). Those guys record pen scratching a piece of paper, buzzsaws and industry machines. On their first record their drummer was hitting stuff he found on the street.
All of this is unimportant, because they used it to create MUSIC.

Listen do "zeit" by tangerine dream. Some violin synths and lots of delayed sounds. 100% texture. No melody, no rythm. Still, it`s music.

Grindcore, heavy metal IS in a big part based on noise (disorted sound isn`t noise?), yet still - it`s music. Good or bad, it`s music.

BTW - why most recording technicans mix a bit of - separately recorded - fret noise into DI recorded bass lines? Bass parts are often messy, (active pickups record lotsa sounds besides notes - ie. fingers hiting strings, fretnoise, left hand sliding on the strings etc. etc) yet musical. I think they`re more musical BECAUSE of that noise.

Why folks don`t use midi? It`s cleaner, cheaper and the timing is better.

Not every noise is music. But again... what exacly is MUSIC? 12 notes?
 
#98
I have listened to music by :

Einsturzenden Neubauten

and it was really horrible - I hated it!!

I have also listened to a lot of Tangerine Dream and liked a lot of it - I have several of their albums.
Very ambient - for KrautRock!! ;)

I think a lot of people are missing the point of this argument - I would like to bet that I have listened to more experimental and avant-garde music than most of the people on this board put together!

I have Music Concrete albums that would have you howling for cover and screaming musical torture!!

But there are two vastly different starting points here, which to me are almost opposite poles.

So there is a huge difference between coming from a starting point of being comitted to making new and interesting music and then pushing the boundaries.

Compared with - a starting point of using a cheap bass guitar to make silly noises for your own amusement!! ;)
 
#99
Originally posted by Bruce Lindfield

.Steve said it was much easier just to use loops . I was tempted to say at that point - well why bother to use a bass, wouldn't it be easier to use a synthesiser/sequencer or digital workstation etc etc ?
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well, if they were using a synthesiser/sequencer or digital workstation to create those sounds, you wouldn't have been watching them at all, seeing as that was at the BASS CENTRE and was a BASS clinic:p

both players demonstrate what you can do live with a bass- Steve Lawson recording and building up loops on the fly, Michael Manring playing multiple parts simultaneously.
the live performance aspect gives it a specialist (muso?) appeal- I doubt the same audience would be watching a sequenced version of the music being reeled off through the P.A.

then there's the visual quality of a bass or guitar being used to create those sounds- what looks better at a live gig - a stationary keyboard player/someone sitting behind a PC/Mac, or a mobile bass or guitar player?
despite what purists might say, the visual side of live performance IS a big part- if it wasn't we might as well take your reasoning further and replace backing bands with a DAT- that's easier, surely?- no mistakes, timing errors, gear breakdowns, trouble getting a mix, feedback problems etc.....
- and we're all out of a job;)
 
#100
Originally posted by Bruce Lindfield

Compared with - a starting point of using a cheap bass guitar to make silly noises for your own amusement!! ;)
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"a cheap bass guitar"?
so it's okay if it's done on an expensive bass like a Modulus, Zon or your Tobias, but not a Hohner B2V or Westone that UK session player Paul Westwood has used on countless records-
on his instructional video he describes how using effects he had to get the sound of an iron bar falling down a well for a TV soundtrack.

ps. didn't Geddy Lee try to create the sound of a monster growling using his bass through lots of effects on Rush's "By-Tor and the snowdog"?
was that a silly noise, and was the P bass he was using at the time too cheap?;)
 
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