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What's important to one style of music, and "sophisticated" or "complex" may be irrelevant in another. It's hard to compare. Take a Bach Fugue, where the notes
by squeaky-clean 10y ago
What's important to one style of music, and "sophisticated" or "complex" may be irrelevant in another. It's hard to compare.
Take a Bach Fugue, where the notes and harmonies are very important, and 'complex' with lots of rules, patterns, intertwining melodies. The specific instruments used doesn't always matter, most pieces could interchangeably be played on piano or harpsichord or organ and sound as beautiful.
Then let's look at something like Scary Monsters by Skrillex, where the entire drop is pretty much just a G with a small melody coming in every 4 measures. There's not much melodic complexity going on there. But the sound production, synthesis and processing is insane. After that song came out everyone was trying to figure out how to make a talking bass that sounded like that. And even years later, barely anyone has figured it out, I've only heard really famous synthesists like Rob Swire get a close sound.
Is a Skrillex drop as complex as a Bach Fugue? If you're just comparing the arrangement, or the melodies, not at all. But the Skrillex song isn't about the melody as much as the texture and dynamics. Bach didn't specify precisely what harmonics should exist in the instruments playing his music. Skrillex probably could not write a Fugue to the standards of Bach's best. But I bet if you sat Bach down in front of a laptop with an FM synthesizer, he couldn't create a "sick drop" either.
It gets entirely too subjective at this point. A lot of people will disagree with me that the production and synthesis techniques should be considered part of music theory or composition. But I think they're concepts that you couldn't replicate certain music without. In my opinion the palindromic structure of a Boards of Canada album is on par with something like Bach's Crab Canon. They just get there in totally different ways.
- baddox 10y agoYou seem to be implying that audio production is a component of music theory. This is something I had never considered. Normally I would not be thinking of audio production when I talk about music theory, but I certainly am not dogmatic about that. Things like timbre and dynamics are (I believe) usually considered part of music theory, so I suppose one could include all aspects of audio production as well.
- komali2 10y agoIn modern music, "audio production" is arguably more important than any other aspect. If we judged your average top 10 hit by the same standards (melody, harmonization) that we did a Bach piece, no modern music would be considered "good" (le wrong generation, I get it). But these songs are popular and drive a multimillion dollar industry, so they must be doing something right. I would point straight to production quality and technique. Why is Dr. Dre so popular? He's a decent rapper but he doesn't really have much content volume. He's who he is because he's one of the best producers in hip-hop. He made a career, a legacy, and an industry out of just being really good at production.
- baddox 10y agoAs an aside, I would argue that writing hooks is actually much more important than audio production. Music snobs like to talk about how simple the melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions are in pop music, but writing incredible hooks is hardly a solved problem and is something I am extremely impressed by.
- gardano 10y agoI continue to be impressed by the Jazz Crusaders, with their incredible melodic/rhythmic hooks. Those are works of genius.
- cubano 10y agoSo absolutely true. It's refreshing to hear someone discuss this in the same terms I do, as almost everyone I talk to about how production has become the music and how Ableton or ProTools is the instrument looks at me like I'm nuts.