7 ms·

I knew guy that could just listen to an engine running, and hear that it had a timing problem! I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a

• gooseyard 4y ago
  I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear. The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean. So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    Right? But in the history rock 'n roll, in the history of music, in the history of warm-blooded vertebrates, I don't know of hardly anyone that was ever a Beatle.
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      No more than a dozen or so. John, Paul, George, Ringo, Pete, George, Billy, Neil, Mal, Eric...
      • Maursault 4y ago
        It's like wondering why anyone is even aware of St. Andrew. He was an Apostle. We need not look any further than that.
  • analog31 4y ago
    Bassist? I get a fair amount of that kind of work too, on bass. Mostly jazz, where the repertoire of "standards" is finite. I also go to fiddle jams, where the fiddlers themselves often have no idea what the harmony should be, or how to express that information. Of course a trick that a layperson might not notice, is that the notes are nowhere close to random. But I love the challenge of that kind of work if it's with good players.
    • gooseyard 4y ago
      Yep! yeah man playing jazz is I think the ultimate challenge for a musician. I made the mistake of trying to lean on fake books for a long time, I think because I didn't believe that it was realistic to memorize enough of the tunes for it to make a difference. Eventually I wound up with a teacher who insisted I do exactly that. I think it should have been obvious to me, but as I'm sure you know, once you have memorized maybe a hundred tunes or so, you develop this mental model that the bulk of all standards fall into on the basis of form, changes, feel etc. Then, even when its an unusual tune, maybe you have to struggle through the first A and B, some kind soul might take pity on you and shout out the changes, and that little bit of extra information is enough combined with all that other stuff you know to get you through the tune. I guess all that memorization is like the conditioning and training that an athlete might do to prepare for an event, and then at the event you're mostly responding conditions.
• zzzeek 4y ago
  agree, having a memory for music is nothing at all like being able to remember like, the dictionary, or the phone book, the human brain has a huge affinity for music memorization. i remember tons of music, songs I heard just once 40 years ago, songs from bands I played in that only we heard 30 years ago, that's just how music is for songs that you've played, they stick in your head. just go to any wedding with a real band. Think those musicians are reading music and rehearsing all those songs? not really, people that play in wedding bands often just show up never having met each other and it's expected that they just know every song you'd ever play, or you can fake it convincingly and perfectly enough on the fly (I did such a gig myself once, and I didnt really do that great, but that was the expectation). this is commonplace and actually required to be a pro-level popular music musician (which I am not).
  • Maursault 4y ago
    True. Music is relatively easy to perform and create (forgetting whether it is Eleanor Rigby or not). But even though there are many that can, let's not diminish the very often seemingly miraculous feat of those that can perfectly perform a piece they've never heard just by reading it, often while they perform it, even though perfectly reading English out loud is a similar exercise. As many people can't read music as can read literature, and I've never heard of music literacy ruining a musician's career. But it is a good thing music is so easy for the curious and determined, because though many have learned it in their later years, learning to read music gets more and more difficult the older one is, but music itself never gets more difficult. Now, Gold Records, OTOH, I seriously doubt are easy to do, even if it was very likely easy for the artist, they had no way of knowing beforehand even if they so claimed.
    • RHSman2 4y ago
      That is the wonderful thing about music. It is actually pretty easy/simple but quite often those simple things move our soul. When we attempt to intellectualize this we forget that part. This is Jazz
      • Maursault 4y ago
• cjohnson318 4y ago
  I think the bizarre takeaway is that he recognized Fran and her boys. There are plenty of geniuses compared to the number of people that can recognize someone from an unimportant chance encounter from 15 or so years back. The fact that a lifelong musician can tell the difference between a mixolydian mode and a dorian mode, or a dominant from a diminished isn't shocking.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    I don't think the author's argument was well-supported. I think it is more likely it was coincidence. In general, coincidences often seem contrived. There are countless photographs Paul McCartney has given to fans. If they were close enough for him to see, then it makes the occasion possible whether he recognized them or not. Hero-worship by a fan is a special thing, "wow, is there anything he can't do?" They're not exactly being objective, and everything the hero does becomes miraculous. Everyone has idiosyncrasies, and famous people are constantly observed, so every little thing they do becomes notable to the fanatic. "Look at the way he holds his fork!"
    • cjohnson318 4y ago
      You raise a good point: it could have been a coincidence. I hadn't thought of that.
• Shorel 4y ago
  Humans are awesome. Some of them anyway. Knowing one or two people in your life who could do such things is actually the opposite of being ordinary. I think you are coming from a place of distrust for cults of personalities, and while I agree, we should not idolise them, we should not go the other extreme, that of the jaded teenager who "has already seen it all" and is therefore incapable of wonder. That's not how we progress as a species, as a civilization.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    I was hoping to avoid being accused of being a Paul McCartney basher. I was bashing the author's silly argument, not Paul McCartney.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  There's levels to this. I once worked in a room full of graphic artists, but one of them had a skill level that was far above everyone else. His "demo" was to draw a detailed dwarf character in full battle armour and wielding a stone hammer... with one continuous line. Without picking up his pen, he could draw this character in minutes with better detail than the other artists could in hours or days. Similarly, Mozart copied down Allegri's Miserere after hearing it just once in 1770. That's a sufficiently amazing achievement that it's still talked about, a quarter of a millennium later!
  • egypturnash 4y ago
    No preliminary rough, just pen to paper? Pretty impressive if so. Especially if he wasn’t sort of bashing in the overall shape first and going back in to add details. And now that I think about it, trying to do this on a regular basis sounds like a pretty good way to boost one’s ability to hold a whole drawing in one’s head and “trace” it onto the paper, rather than doing a rough. I would not be surprised if this ability started as a game he played with himself when he was sitting in the back of his least favorite high school classes, doodling away. (I am an artist; I can’t do this particular trick but I have definitely had moments when I was totally into a drawing and it felt like I was tracing it onto the paper from my mental image of it, with the hand of a dead artist I’d been studying guiding mine. I was also pretty high at the time; there’s some strains of weed that artists favor because it can give us a boost to this sort of ability.)
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure I have aphantisia, but for a few rare moments I could visualise a complete image against a blank surface and even start tracing it. I could never hold on to this for more than a few seconds. My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.
      • badpun 4y ago
        > My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it. Check out Kim Jung Gi. He's basically doing that in real time, with impossible speed, accuracy and level of detail. He's making a living via performing live shows of his skills.
• A-Train 4y ago
  Except Paul McCartney is considered as one of the best song writers of all time. There may be many musicians who can do the same on a technical level but even then he is a significant outlier.
  • 72deluxe 4y ago
    But some of his lyrics are terrible: how many times can you say "in"? In this world in which we live in... And "someone's knocking at the door, someone's ringing a bell, do me a favour, go to the door, open it and let them in"... It's like he was trying to lyricise everyday activities. Very odd. I say this as a penniless musician in contrast to the very successful Mr McCartney (who plays bass lines like he's playing the tuba, very clever)
    • veltas 4y ago
      I wish people would sing about the mundane rather than sex, drugs and crime all day.
      • Maursault 4y ago
        I think A Day in the Life fits that requirement.
    • swores 4y ago
      In my opinion this is like criticising Picasso's paintings for not being anything close to as realistic as photos. Fine, it's a valid opinion to dislike either for those reasons, but for many people it was, and is, art that's exciting in part because of its perfect non-perfection.
      • 72deluxe 4y ago
        I think with lyrics most people don't give them a second thought and don't realise what the person is singing about. Most people can't even tell you which instrument is being used in a part of a song. This is different to visual art - most people can play spot the difference no problem, but with audio most people are deaf to the details, and the lyrics! Eg. My Sharona - most people don't realise it includes the lyric "I always get it up for the younger kind"....
• RHSman2 4y ago
  It isn’t that he was a Beatle. It is that he is Paul McCartney.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    Not really, no. I don't believe McCartney's best songs would have been as good as they are without Lennon's pessimistic criticism. Otherwise, McCartney may have become like Pygmalion falling in love with his sculpture, Galatea. Unfortunately in this metaphor, Lennon is Venus who solves Pygmalion's problem that the sculpture was not a real person. But I hope the point is made, which is that only through dissent does anything progress to excellence.
    • RHSman2 4y ago
      What?
      • Maursault 4y ago
        McCartney didn't create in a vacuum, and if everyone always agreed, nothing would change for the better.
        • RHSman2 4y ago
          That is the beauty of all things.
• danbmil99 4y ago
  Speaking of music and memory.. A guy named Hilly Kristal ran the famous nightclub CBGB's for something like 30 years. My band was lucky to play there a few times in the '80s. It was said about Hilly that he remembered every single band that ever played at the club. Years later I ran into him on the street and he immediately recognized me. Not only that, he asked how every member of the band was doing by name. We were never famous or anything, he just had this love of music and musicians and a steel trap mind for these details.
  • partomniscient 4y ago
    There's a movie titles CBGB about him/the club, played by the late Alan Rickman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c I'm guessing they play a little fast and loose with history, but its a good watch.
• gadders 4y ago
  "In 2003, comedian Billy Crystal was asked, on the field at Yankee Stadium before one of the league championship series games, for his first recollection of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. "I was sitting right up there [first-base side, upper deck],'' Crystal said. "In the second game of a doubleheader, Ted Williams strikes out against Bobby Shantz. Thirty years later, I meet Mr. Williams. I said, 'I have home movies of you striking out against Bobby Shantz in the second game of a doubleheader at the Stadium.' He looked at me and I swear, Tim, he says, 'Curveball, low and away.' He said, 'Ellie [Yankees catcher Elston Howard] dropped the ball and tagged me, right?' I said, 'Yes, that's it!'"" https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/6996357/seventy-years-later-remembering-ted-williams-magical-season https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/6996357/seventy-years-...
• Tepix 4y ago
  I know a guy who subbed at a concert for the bass player on short notice. Before the gig started he listened to the first song and learned its bass line. During the first song (while he was performing it) he was listening to the second song on his headphones and learning its bass line! It's utterly mind blowing what the human mind is capable of.
  • mcv 4y ago
    He's listening to one song while playing another song? That is mind-blowing.
• indigoabstract 4y ago
  I think that works both ways: what sets the Beatles apart is that they had Paul McCartney as a member during his (probably) best creative years.
  • RHSman2 4y ago
    And he was tremendously creative because of his relationships with other very creative people.
• mcv 4y ago
  If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band. I think it's absolutely justified to discuss a particularly talented musician's mind. Of course there are many good musicians who can play a tune immediately after hearing in (if you want to see this in action, check out Rick Beato or Justin Hawkins on Youtube), but having heard it once decades ago, not knowing what the song is or who it's from, trying to find out and failing, and yet perfectly reproducing it including all the verses, decades later, that's absolutely an example of a really impressive memory.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    > If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band. For an argument, this is question-begging, but I'm not going to argue that The Beatles were ordinary, because provably they changed music, and this is both a criticism of them and a compliment. However, for all we know, if they hadn't been so prolific in performing and marketing themselves from their earlier career, we might have missed them entirely. The more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more they play, etc. Though it should be noted that whomever is judging these kinds of achievements of covering a song from memory isn't exactly critically comparing the original side by side with the reproduction. "It sounded exactly the same," is likely embellishment by someone without a trained ear. Picking up a song is such a common notion that it has its own idiom, namely "picking up a song."
  • Maursault 4y ago
    > If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual I should add but can no longer edit my reply, that these two are distinctly contrasting and somehow complementary. Notable about McCartney is that with all the success, accomplishment and tragedy in is life, he is still able to be happy. He stands as a positive example of how to be, focusing on the bright side of things, an optimist. In contrast, Lennon wasn't satisfied with anything and always had something negative to say about everything. He never seemed happy unless he was causing conflict. He was a pessimist. They seem to be two sides of the same coin of humanity, a yang and a yin that make a complete and comprehensive picture. Both sides are important if not essential. If Lennon was instead McCartney's yes-man, McCartney's music would have suffered. Lennon's criticism made McCartney's songs better than they would have been otherwise, and McCartney's positive support allowed Lennon's music to be developed rather than abandoned.
• bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician? The first several minutes of reading are an anecdote about memory that has absolutely nothing to do with music.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    While you're arguing a straw man, that portion was only exposition to support the subject and underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory. But in particular, that portion was not well-supported nor all that compelling. It was, as you say, "anecdote." The idea the PM "doesn't just take pictures with random people" is absurd on its face, neither provable nor unprovable. Surely there are hundreds or thousands of such pictures.[1] [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+mccartney+with+fans&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+mccartney+with+fans&tbm...
    • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      >underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about, secondly unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man? You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address. If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article; the article makes several arguments for things McCartney has remembered being out of the ordinary that were not musical, you dismissed his having a phenomenal memory by essentially saying all trained musicians remember music. Which has hardly any bearing on the arguments in the article. I agree that the article's examples are not well supported, or from my viewpoint based on more supposition than someone should make when trying to establish something as freakish. But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!
      • Maursault 4y ago
• crucialfelix 4y ago
  If you watch Get Back, it is kind of freakish how fluid Paul and John are. Telepathic communication, writing songs constantly for a decade.
• avip 4y ago
  It's true. Lots of amateur musicians can do that to some degree. Of-course results vary, but it's common. I'm probably "not even an amateur", whatever that means, and with popular music I can usually play a song (the chords) after hearing it once. Pop music is oftentimes 4-5 chords picked from a well known set of ~7 progressions, without any scale change. I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    > I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial. Granted, but Queen didn't just show up at the studio unprepared. Given the same preparation Queen gave, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you could pick up any of their songs, making it look easy to someone that didn't observe your preparation.
• badpun 4y ago
  Did you read the article? Most of the examples given in it have nothing to do with music.
  • Maursault 4y ago
    I ignored the irrelevant and unsupported anecdotal premises and focused on and defeated the underlying argument which is "Paul McCartney is a great musician because his memory is freakish." I think, instead, like anyone at the top of their field, McCartney is a great musician because he studied and practiced music.
    • badpun 4y ago
      There's plenty of people who studied and practiced music who didn't become great musicians. So, it's a necessary, but not sufficient component. I suspect great memory is absolutely a huge boost for any musician, probably even more so than in other fields (where it's also a huge boost).
• bjoli 4y ago
  I have studied classical music, and a friend of mine applied to a master in conducting. In the entrance exam they had to listen to a 4-part piece and when it was down they had to write it down. Genius level would however be the following: There is a rumour about a mass that the Catholic church held secret (I believe it was an Allegri mass). One day Mozart went to the service and when he got back he wrote it down.
• d0mine 4y ago
  It reminds me the chess memory experiment where more experienced chess players had much better recall of real chess positions than novices and the same recall for random positions (around 4 pieces). If it is the same phenomena then we may expect that Paul as an experienced musician should have an excellent recall for real music and an ordinary one (no better than anyone) for cacophony (random sounds).