Still. You could easily get into the rut of constant blues playing, pentatonic scales, stuck to blues formula. At the extreme here in the San Francisco South Bay we have all these blues bands with elderly good musicians that crank out the same music evening after evening. Nobody is exactly enjoying it.

What I suspect happening is that when you get really well-versed in a style, you want to stay there and enjoy the woodshedding results. Instead of growing as a musician and try other styles and expand your mind.

There are other similar cases like all the DeadMau5 wanna-bes in bedrooms who crank out techno track after techno track with the same formula. Recently I’ve noticed that even in genres like tech house, things have become very stagnated and boring. You learn how to program the tech house drums and bass lines and you are stuck there…

There’s really a simple solution. Just do something totally different. If nothing else, think of the poor audience that really wants to enjoy new music and will get the same dessert evening after evening.

Personally I like artists and bands that surprise me year after year. Even if there’s sometimes a hit-and-miss case, just the effort to try something and expand is what counts.

• Unkle – Heaven — How ambient voices should be produced.
• Stevie Wonder – Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing — Take complex chord progressions and turn it into a pop hit.
• Metric – Help I’m Alive — Good pop song, good arrangements, what else do you want…
• Boards of Canada – I Saw Drones – Ambient could be short, too.
• Howard Jones – Another Chance – You could do pop songs with arpeggiators.
• Steve Vai – Aching Hunger — Wish I had that kind of vibrato technique.

Which is good. And also bad.

What happens with such reconstruction jobs is that without really knowing how compositions work someone ends up with a very bland productions. Things come and go but there’s really no dynamic content, or thinking behind it, or even much inspirational parts. The closest I could think of this is doing microwaved food for a four-star restaurant.

Well, you could always learn and improve. My suggestions is to either look at classical composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky, see how their minds tick when they compose larger bodies of work, how themes come and go, how various parts play unexpected roles here and there.

A couple of modern day bands/artists that have a similar know-how, I suspect based on hours and hours perfecting this, is The Orb or System 7. Actually there’s even  a cross-over such as the Art of Noise album where they re-interpret Debussy — highly recommend this one to get a feeling how to compose music with any sample you have around.

Here’s an example of a quick hack I did in one hour: Download audio file (SyntheticRaga.mp3)

Tested just installed Kontakt 3.5 with a quick run on the keyboard and added PSP Nitro with a very spacy filtering setup to see how it sounded like.

It’s a no-brainer to make ambient space music, even with a classical twist.

Download audio file (RetroFunk.mp3)

Most likely this will go to my audio attic. But it was fun making it.

Download audio file (Kidzoo.mp3)

A Tambourine is a hit machine.

Here’s a quick starting song I worked on two hours ago: Download audio file (Transgalactic_snippet.mp3)
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It’s kind of the direction I’m going towards for the time being, guitars, drums and synthetic bass. Mixing eighties with psychedelic sixties.

I have to get a triangle next.

And oh my goodness. Hair bands with screaming singers an cliche lyrics, or then artists with costumes singing poppy songs and dancing badly. No wonder the eighties is considered a bad time for music if you just focus on the American scene.

Meanwhile, in Europe we listened to Ultravox, early incarnations of U2, Simple Minds, New Order and a lot of similar bands that were pushing the boundaries concerning synthesizer use as well as still providing strong melodic lines with very interesting arrangements. And no 200bpm guitar solos, that’s for sure.

It’s kind of nice that bands like the Killers and Keane re-introduces this more interesting music style from the eighties. My background is first listening to a lot of seventies music and playing that in high school bands, but then I was mostly active in the early to late eighties and was involved in bands doing this kind of European eighties music. It was fun, very much pushing the limits and was still commercial.

It’s not good to always copy-cat past styles but this would be an exception to make the music scene interesting again — unless I start sounding like and old-timer wishing for the good times. Or, alternatively, just start another interesting music scene, that’s as valid. If nothing else, please get the synthesizers back as arrangement tools and not designed to do staccato techno lines all the time.

I think I played his track ‘Hey, Hey, My, My’ long time ago in a high school band configuration, think I even sang it, hepp.

Check out Neil Young’s acoustic guitar playing on various YouTube movies, such as this one, Old Man. He’s good!

Both the painters and composers could have problems with releases, too many paintings does not means that every painting is a master piece. A  good example is Picasso, I think most art medium to bigger sized gallerias in Europe has something  by Picasso on sale — even in the small town where I went to college in Finland. So it’s a matter of establishing some kind of filtering system in order to avoid releasing everything at all means. I think this is where some composers or musicians fail.

There’s also the other extreme of not releasing what you have produced, feeling that it is inferior. The problem is that the audience should make that decision, not the artist. I must say this is a tricky area as the artists don’t want whatever to be released.

Both painters and composers go through periods where they feel they don’t have anything to contribute. And then suddenly there’s this burst of creativity that produces more material than expected.

Did I mention that painters (and musicians) usually tend to be very emotional?

Not that I’m somewhat more fond of Todd, his follow-up one. But the trio of Something/Anything, Wizard a True Star and Todd was pretty much an eye opener to a young musician in Finland long time ago.

There’s something special about an artist who just goes ahead and breaks barriers concerning musical styles and what an album should really contain. I think that’s the biggest lesson I got from those three albums. And yes, that good songs are always the backbone of any album.

Beck – Gamma Ray