How can it be a good thing that there are no 'good' musicians? You might not be interested in exotic scales, but if everyone who picked up a guitar was only able to play power chords in drop-d tuning where would the diversity be? Oh, forgive me, it's where heavy rock is today;)
What you call 'showing off knowledge of Lydian modes' might be 'expressing a particular feeling' for the musician. Scales and picking techniques and whatever are just tools, and learning how to use them to learn how to use your instrument in new ways should always be considered a good thing IMHO. Now, if you don't like the way some people use these tools then that's fine, but saying people suck just because they use the techniques they've learnt to express themselves is as closed minded as saying Kurt Cobain sucked because he never went above the 12th fret or whatever.
Yes, the 70's pre Pistols endless blues soloing and the 80's/90's pre Nirvana hair metal shredding might occasionally (;)) have crossed the line into self indulgence but again, if that's what they wanted to say ('I'm great!') fine. Noone has/had to listen or agree.
As long as it's in the context of a good song, I like pretty much any kind of guitar playing. The Beatles or Radiohead don't have many tapped arpeggio solos but it still moves me. A guitar/keyboard harmony solo on a Stratovarius song does too, just in different ways, and isn't that what music should be about? The guitar is a fantastic instrument that can do so much, limiting it just seems daft to me. I never could understand why detuning to create the proper timbre should be considered good while sweep picking arpeggios should be considered bad.
Just for the record, my favourite guitar player now is The Edge in U2. Not much shredding there, but that doesn't mean I don't still listen to my old Extreme records every now and then!
When did anyone say the Sith limit themselves to two in the entire galaxy? I took it to mean that they just like to hang out in pairs, that where you find one, you'll find another. Not that there always ONLY two of them. Of course, I'm not a Star Wars geek (*COUGH* no really, your honor!) so I might have missed something.
The groups who release games take away the cd checks out of the games and if this new media isn't accompanied by new methods of checking that might stump them, it will be business as usual and isos will continue to be on the net before the games are in the store. Delay that for 30 - 60 days? Forgive me for being sceptical.:)
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you wrote the article, and wasn't just referring to it (didn't pay attention!). Fair enough, you can change the time signatures, but if the legal definition of a melody has 4 notes in it, shouldn't you at least use 4 durations since each note can have a different duration than the other 3 (!). Unless I'm missing something, of course, which is definitely not impossible.
Besides: Your dismissal of triplets as 'trivial' has been reported to the NOMOTC;)
The article says 'Assume... a judge will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half).'
I guess it's fine to restrict yourself to the western scale if you're talking about 'RIAA music' but restricting yourself to just 3 durations will mean you miss quite a lot. Just by adding whole and sixteenth notes you get 216000 melodies, and 32nd notes (Yngwie Malmsteen still plays guitar) you get 373248. And then there are triplet variations of the notes.
You only get the 46,656 number if you assume there's only three durations but as the article says, a rich lobby could try to do that, and also reduce the intervals to 7 and durations to 1 to get even fewer. But since all pop music comes from the blues (a lobby could argue;)) why not reduce the intervals to 5 and end up with just 125 possible melodies?
I just felt I should suggest (since you seem to like to refer to that article) adding a little something saying the 47000 possible melodies is only correct with some (dubious) assumptions made, not cold hard fact.
Notes have length as well as pitch. If you play C, D, E, F as 8th notes you will have a different melody than if you play C as a 32nd, D as a 16th, E as an 8th and F as a 4th and so on.
The same notes (with same lengths) played over a C major chord will sound different than when played over an A minor chord as well. Should a melody in a song be defined just by the notes in the actual melody or by the melody together with the underlying chord progression (which has a big effect on how the melody sounds)?
I'm a football (soccer) fan, following the English Premier league and the Premiership 'supper site that meets all baseball fan needs' is something that we'll probably never get. The main reason is that all the official sites, both those run by the teams and the official premier league site all tow the party line and publish nice, safe news with the same old cliche quotes recycled over and over again. Then you have the big independent football news sites who also try to be the 'meets all needs' site, who in the time honored tradition of the british gutter press drum up exclusive after exlusive where 2+2 = 5, just to bring the punters in. Since neither no information nor misinformation meets my needs, I've chosen neither and use the small fan sites dedicated to each club instead. You get more interesting and correct information on the forums of the fan sites in one day than you get in a month on the big news sites. I only visit the big site(s) for match statistics and the like.
Things might of course be different in the MLB world, but I find it difficult to believe baseball fans are so different from football fans that the organization's view of what a fans needs are will ever match the fans own views of what their needs are.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they'll use laser tracking? Err, I'll get my coat.
How can it be a good thing that there are no 'good' musicians? You might not be interested in exotic scales, but if everyone who picked up a guitar was only able to play power chords in drop-d tuning where would the diversity be? Oh, forgive me, it's where heavy rock is today ;)
What you call 'showing off knowledge of Lydian modes' might be 'expressing a particular feeling' for the musician. Scales and picking techniques and whatever are just tools, and learning how to use them to learn how to use your instrument in new ways should always be considered a good thing IMHO. Now, if you don't like the way some people use these tools then that's fine, but saying people suck just because they use the techniques they've learnt to express themselves is as closed minded as saying Kurt Cobain sucked because he never went above the 12th fret or whatever.
Yes, the 70's pre Pistols endless blues soloing and the 80's/90's pre Nirvana hair metal shredding might occasionally (;)) have crossed the line into self indulgence but again, if that's what they wanted to say ('I'm great!') fine. Noone has/had to listen or agree.
As long as it's in the context of a good song, I like pretty much any kind of guitar playing. The Beatles or Radiohead don't have many tapped arpeggio solos but it still moves me. A guitar/keyboard harmony solo on a Stratovarius song does too, just in different ways, and isn't that what music should be about? The guitar is a fantastic instrument that can do so much, limiting it just seems daft to me. I never could understand why detuning to create the proper timbre should be considered good while sweep picking arpeggios should be considered bad.
Just for the record, my favourite guitar player now is The Edge in U2. Not much shredding there, but that doesn't mean I don't still listen to my old Extreme records every now and then!
Mess my posts up, that is. Wtf?
...every day of my life.
When did anyone say the Sith limit themselves to two in the entire galaxy? I took it to mean that they just like to hang out in pairs, that where you find one, you'll find another. Not that there always ONLY two of them. Of course, I'm not a Star Wars geek (*COUGH* no really, your honor!) so I might have missed something.
The groups who release games take away the cd checks out of the games and if this new media isn't accompanied by new methods of checking that might stump them, it will be business as usual and isos will continue to be on the net before the games are in the store. Delay that for 30 - 60 days? Forgive me for being sceptical. :)
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you wrote the article, and wasn't just referring to it (didn't pay attention!). Fair enough, you can change the time signatures, but if the legal definition of a melody has 4 notes in it, shouldn't you at least use 4 durations since each note can have a different duration than the other 3 (!). Unless I'm missing something, of course, which is definitely not impossible.
;)
Besides: Your dismissal of triplets as 'trivial' has been reported to the NOMOTC
The article says 'Assume ... a judge will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half).'
I guess it's fine to restrict yourself to the western scale if you're talking about 'RIAA music' but restricting yourself to just 3 durations will mean you miss quite a lot. Just by adding whole and sixteenth notes you get 216000 melodies, and 32nd notes (Yngwie Malmsteen still plays guitar) you get 373248. And then there are triplet variations of the notes.
You only get the 46,656 number if you assume there's only three durations but as the article says, a rich lobby could try to do that, and also reduce the intervals to 7 and durations to 1 to get even fewer. But since all pop music comes from the blues (a lobby could argue ;)) why not reduce the intervals to 5 and end up with just 125 possible melodies?
I just felt I should suggest (since you seem to like to refer to that article) adding a little something saying the 47000 possible melodies is only correct with some (dubious) assumptions made, not cold hard fact.
Notes have length as well as pitch. If you play C, D, E, F as 8th notes you will have a different melody than if you play C as a 32nd, D as a 16th, E as an 8th and F as a 4th and so on. The same notes (with same lengths) played over a C major chord will sound different than when played over an A minor chord as well. Should a melody in a song be defined just by the notes in the actual melody or by the melody together with the underlying chord progression (which has a big effect on how the melody sounds)?
I'd say being able to go 'You're fucking nicked, me old beauty' ala John Cleese would beat anything the FBI could come up with.
I'm a football (soccer) fan, following the English Premier league and the Premiership 'supper site that meets all baseball fan needs' is something that we'll probably never get. The main reason is that all the official sites, both those run by the teams and the official premier league site all tow the party line and publish nice, safe news with the same old cliche quotes recycled over and over again. Then you have the big independent football news sites who also try to be the 'meets all needs' site, who in the time honored tradition of the british gutter press drum up exclusive after exlusive where 2+2 = 5, just to bring the punters in. Since neither no information nor misinformation meets my needs, I've chosen neither and use the small fan sites dedicated to each club instead. You get more interesting and correct information on the forums of the fan sites in one day than you get in a month on the big news sites. I only visit the big site(s) for match statistics and the like.
Things might of course be different in the MLB world, but I find it difficult to believe baseball fans are so different from football fans that the organization's view of what a fans needs are will ever match the fans own views of what their needs are.