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Seinfeld Theme Song

#61
xrockstrongox said:
This from someone with 10 years on talkbass?
;)
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My point is it appears that people are wired differently so that what may be funny to one may not be funny to another. It doesn't mean that one is right and the other wrong. If there is one thing I dislike it's polarization and polarizing topics. In my sister's case, for instance, I don't get angry or frustrated when she doesn't find Seinfeld funny. I already know through all these years that we're unlikely to laugh at the same things. I'm sure in her mind there is something logical going on making her think something isn't funny and in my mind something logical is going on making me think something is funny. However, no I don't understand why such radical differences exist in people and being on TB for ten years has done nothing to clarify that.
 
#62
CGremlin said:
My sister and I are the exact opposite - there's very little that one finds funny that the other doesn't. My wife on the other hand...well, let's just say that watching Monty Python is a very solitary experience for me.
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Maybe it's because it's British humor, but with me Monty Python is usually totally hilarious, but sometimes I suppose borders on being silly. Some of those skits, though, are legendary as far as I'm concerned.
 
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#72
MVE said:
My Brother had a DX-11, that brings back some memories.
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My DX5 is here at home, but I've got an original DX7 (with an E! expansion board), TX216, and SY77 in storage, and way back when I did a book for Alexander Publishing about using the E! board with the DX7IID/FD. I liked the old Yamaha DX's a lot (noisy as they were, the first gen anyway), but a lot of people didn't grok the whole FM (PM, actually) synthesis thing and didn't get past the factory patches.

Almost bought a DX1 back in 2008. Wish I had - the guy was selling for $4K, and you can't find them for under $10K now.
 
#74
WillInDenver said:
I can see how the average person would have thought that the Seinfeld thing was a bass guitar. Listening to it with critical ears, though, there are a few clear signs that it's a sampled keyboard riff. The bends, for example, are a little too assertive to have been done on a bass, unless it was maybe a tenor bass or strung with extremely light gauge strings. Also, the sample voice has a little too much sustain.

Also, as is the case with a lot of sampled instruments from that era, the various notes sound like different pitches of the exact same sound, rather than notes played on varying parts of a string instrument. On a bass, the F at the 3rd fret on the D string sounds different from the one at the 1st fret on the E in more ways than just being an octave higher, is what I'm getting at, and you can hear that not to be the case in the Seinfeld theme.

That said, you can also tell that the guy who played the line on the keyboard had spent a little time playing bass. The note choices and a lot of the articulation and accents do sound like they would probably sound on a bass. It's a well-crafted keyboard line.

Here's another case study from the same era - Howard Jones' tune "Things Can Only Get Better." The bass on this song wasn't fooling anyone; it was obviously a synth line. But - listen to it, the construction of the bassline, including a few of the fills and ad-libs underneath the keyboard solo at 2:40, sounds, to my ears, exactly like it would have if it had been played on an actual bass:

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Pino Palladino played on that Howard Jones LP. Listen especially to "No One is to Blame" Classic fretless.
 
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