One of the shortcomings of electronic music or any music that heavily rely on loops/samples or software tools (generators or manipulators) is that the producer can not reproduce them so easily when he/she loses the materials. Every artist would dream of their own works being eternal but today's culture has turned desires for datelessness to a futile hope.

1- Is it true for you too?

2- Are you interested in sheet music to make your music immortal?

3- Is sheet music more artistic than other kinds?

4- @black.afrika.zulu.x and @Lambchop you're extremely using loops/samples. Your art is sth like below images. Is this thread a big concern for you?

Thank you so much!

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 8, 2017

One of the shortcomings of orchestral music is it requires an orchestra. Lose the orchestra, no more music. Which is okay -- no shortage of music out there. The trick is to create a shortage, which, in turn, will create demand

Why paper? I cleverly encode my artistry in viral dna, it replicates itself uncountable times (exterminating mankind in the process), and then lies dormant, waiting, waiting. Forever!
jk, what's wrong with current ̶t̶o̶x̶i̶c̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶a̶g̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ server farms like YT & SC?

Yes, but only if pink, scented, and stained with tears.

 

ِ1- Don't you think these explanations are just flimsy excuses for not taking necessary actions to be in the formal music path?

2-You know formal music is almost a different realm. In no university loop-making, drum-programming, weird-sound-desigings, etc are being tutored. I think there're big reasons for that. Don't you think so?

3- Also composition in their terminologies means sth else than ours as DAW users and peculiar music makers. Are they laggard or we and our audiences have understood music wrong?

@MMJ2017 my friend, you're also free to answer these questions if you want.



Also listen to this beautiful piece while answering:
https://clyp.it/vs4yuo0n

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 9, 2017

Top Melody is the only element in songs or pieces that can be reproduced just by listening. If all characteristics of sounds are being considered, the only element that human can distinguish a bit easily is the discrete pitches (we call them tone). In music, auditory system is more sensitive to the pitches and tracking them. Other characteristics are being omitted from the human's perceptions and so easily getting forgotten unless you've spent your whole life trying to distinguish all the differences that even for big producers is almost impossible. Copyrighting the melody as connection of discrete pitches would be remained as the only copyrightable component of songs just because of our big weakness in remembering all the details.

With the complexity of mixing sounds with today's tools I think reproduction should be forgotten.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 9, 2017

Sheet music basically preserves the harmonic and melodic structures of your composition. it has nothing to do with loops and sound design. You may have the grooves, chords, and melodies written in notation form, then transfer them to midi files, and dress them up with infinite sound design possibilities. On top of that, add sound processing and filters. From that perspective, it is practically impossible to replicate someone else's loops perfectly. If your loop is gone, it's gone.

The best way to preserve your sample-based composition is to render all midi files and FX to audio, piece together all loops in a single audio file, and create stems with the exact same length from beginning to end with your DAW project settings at the highest quality possible.

For me, the most important uses of sheet music are (1) to keep a record for the copyright office, (2) to have a classically-trained player perform some otherwise-impossible-for-me-to-do musical execution, and (3) to read for when playing live -although most people only use real books and chord charts. Music is made immortal when your performance moves people emotionally and is at least decently recorded and mixed. No listeners will read the charts. As for preservation of your music works, yeah, it's great to have sheets of your songs if you can procure them. However, when you file a notation sheet for the copyright office, they will only take the "piano" sheet, i.e. the top melody line and the chords to it. Arrangements are not copyrightable.

No. It'd be like saying that an native African or South American language with no formal written form is less of a language than English. All languages are equally useful for their peoples. The advantage of using sheet music in writing music - in my opinion, is that it imposes a notation style that "helps" you "stay" on "standardized" tonal and rhythmic structures. Of course you can notate complex key modes and time signatures, for example, but by the time someone is able to notate things like that, they'll have learned a lot of music theory, hence a win-win from all angles.

 

No need to be decently recorded or mixed to become a classic:

 

If you think it is important for other people to be able to play your /composition/ --> sheet music.

Even if it is heavily | distorted | mangled | w.e. they'll figure out something similar and go with what they think sounded like blah...

If you could care less about other people performing your /track/ and you just want to expose it yourself, doesn't really matter if you have it written down or not as nobody else will ever see it.

 

This is silly...

 

Welcome back @Cav Emp . Happy to see you again!

For the experimentation period yes, every question and action seem silly but after that when everything is getting more serious, for that problem a practical solution has to be planned.

If you're not a melodic and harmonic guy, maybe reproduction doesn't matter at all but for the people seeing music in the melody, and harmony, it's an important issue.

My problem is I'm using too many notes and I can not easily remember what I've done and after 5 or 6 projects if I'd lose files I'd better be dead.

The only thing that can be saved in the memory is some unclear images of the process that have been carried out not the exact details. If you want to be a good performer you must set down all of the elaborate steps of your production somewhere to be easily accessible for further reviews and reproductions.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 9, 2017

Hey foster

I think you're wasting your energy worrying about hypothetical worst case scenarios. Keep backups on a spare drive. I keep two of them. Forget about having too many notes -- there are too many instruments for you to reproduce the music yourself.

Also dude - simpler melodies. I barely know shit about music theory and I STILL struggle with this sometimes, getting carried away in trying to make something "unique and original" instead of something that's simply nice to listen to. There are only so many musical notes; they've all been tried and people have mostly figured out what sounds good. Simpler melodies are more memorable for you AND whoever else is listening to your music.

 

Should painters also leave a detailed set of instructions (a paint-by-numbers canvas of their work?) if they get srs about their aht?

 

@foster911 Just read P. Goetschius - Lessons in music form, you'll feel much better

 

No one expects a painter to recreate the exact copy but music is like movie or play. Is play when has been written performable and is movie when unperformable. Depends on the genres and more importantly the artist's deftness. You know why people are interested in the freeze button inside DAWs because they subconsciously want to get rid of the hassle of making their music recreatable and performable.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 10, 2017

I am not able to exactly reproduce any piece of music that I play.
If I was lucky to push the REC button, than it stays on the drive until the drive dies, and that`s it.
...even after listening my own recording, I am not able to play the same again... after a minute I just "loose myself" and as a consequence, each take is different... similar, but different.

(I am talking about playing piano and guitars)

With loops, I have no experience, except with some drum loops that I often use to lay down the main idea; but after that I always ask the drummer to play it however he things it is appropriate.

 

Thank you my friend for talking quite upfrontly as an instrumentalist about our common problem.

 

I've heard this sentence from the mouth of a professor of classical music that it's fiendishly complicated to specify the exact irregular meter of most modern music's pieces just by listening without any score, let alone to guess the harmonic structure of most music and trying to replicate them without scores.

 

You won't be able to enforce your intellectual property rights against people copying your work, or defend against claims of having copied yourself, if you don't have a score.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno, the first 'ambient' recording, was converted into a score by the Bang On A Can classical music collective, and performed live using traditional instruments at the opening of London's Stanstead airport in 1998. Eno burst into tears after the first few bars and when asked why said that the making of a score had rendered something ephemeral into something timeless, that would carry on after he was gone.

 

There are companies in the US that specialize in leveraged patent claims against companies that have almost no material worth, but which are so complex, so onerous and expensive to defend that it’s cheaper to settle out of court. They make a living doing that to people who invent things. That’s why Microsoft has patented computed on an astronomical scale, it’s not to sue anybody, it’s to defend against the shitehawks.

There are agents, and it’s always agents, in the music industry who do exactly that to musicians and their work.

Keep a score. Whatever you do to make the synth sound, record it in MIDI and run Sibelius over it, and submit it to your national performing rights society. They don’t need to accept your claim, they just need to date it. Even better, start a rinkydink publishing company as well as a label. If you ever make money from your music, you get paid twice over.

 

This is the oldest song with lyrics and notation that we have got.

While you live, shine
have no grief at all
life exists only for a short while
and time demands an end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph