Does music need an audience? | Q+A

welcome to the super fast instagram q a while you are here please make sure the synth and the vocals are in the same key thank you for your cooperation when i listen to music quietly it sounds like it's in a different key to when i play it louder so yeah this is crazy how loud you listen to a piece of music actually affects your perception of pitch and because of that might affect your perception of key center as the music that you're listening to gets louder the high frequencies start sounding higher in pitch and the low frequencies start sounding lower in pitch it's for this reason that i know that a lot of sound engineers prefer to mix at very low volumes they monitor very quietly so as to not alter their pitch perception of the music that they're working on in other words don't turn up the music too loud kids because then all of the music that you're listening to starts sounding like it's in different keys and we can't have that because remember you should make sure the synth and the vocals are in the same key what would music be without an audience so i feel like there's two possible answers to this question there's the philosophical answer which is more along the lines of a zen cone if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to perceive the vibrations of it falling does it make a sound if air is wiggling around in different permutations but nobody is there to perceive it is it music and you know musicians have been having to deal with the much more practical answer to this question since march and that is what is it like to make music with literally nobody there to hear you live streams have become the only real way that musicians can present their craft in real time to an audience playing a song from beginning to end speaking of somebody who has done a couple of these live streams it's it's a really strange experience you have to perform as if there is an audience there in front of you even if there physically isn't one and it becomes stranger the more instruments you add to your performance in the live stream if i'm just there noodling around with a singer it's fine it feels intimate to me it's the kind of thing that would not normally even need to have an audience and because of that the live stream feels like it's capturing a moment rather than a performance but if i'm doing a live stream with more people to no audience it becomes a little bit stranger because you have to perform as if there was an audience physically in front of you but with none of the cues that have been built up over years of performing in live situations tonight we're doing a live stream gig at a venue in brooklyn called the soapbox gallery i don't know it's kind of a kind of a new way of approaching this it's almost kind of like an old way of approaching it because back in the day when you had recording sessions you mostly just had one take and it's like well that was the take and that's kind of where we're at right now so in a way it's very much like the old school way of recording that's kind of fun it's a challenge for sure but i think we can do it i'm playing with my mask on [Laughter] the etiquette for how to do this live has not been established yet so we're like [Music] [Applause] [Music] there's a term that i really like called music which comes from the christopher small book of the same title it basically refers to how we interact with music compare listening to a song on your headphones on the subway to watching a band perform that song live it's the same song same piece of music but radically different music they're different relationships between the space around you and the relationship of the band to you and your relationship to the band those experiences are music differently even though the music is the same what we are seeing right now and this is fascinating to me as well as heartbreaking is a shift away from a form of music that has existed since literally the dawn of civilization you have a bunch of people together and you make music and we can't do that recording live streams beat making and production those are all forms of music and people are consuming those forms more than ever and that consumption by the way is often framed as having an audience and at least that's how it's presented in the many many youtube videos that you'll find on the subject but i really don't think that kind of audience is the same so i don't think that the tree makes a sound if nobody is there to hear it if that makes any sense also the sound of one hand clapping is this what do you think of andrew huang he's a lovely human being and he asks very good questions for instagram q a videos what more could you want in a person what is a simple explanation for frequencies think about what the word frequency means it means how often a thing occurs in a given amount of time the frequency of seconds in a minute 60. the frequency of hours in a day 24. when we talk about the frequency of a note we're talking about how often the air vibrates in a given second so if we generated a tone at say 432 hertz the air around your ear is vibrating 432 times per second and you are perceiving a pitch the true pitch by the way why is the bass always turned down so low in the mix of commercial pop so the way that you really have to think about it is that bass guitar is not actually the bass instrument in most commercial recordings i know db504 go after me if you listen to the kick drum on the other hand that's where all the sub information lies that's where all the low end actually is if you put too much low end bass and the sound of a bass guitar it starts sounding very muddy when you try and mix it with a kick drum and the people man they'd rather hear the sound of a clear kick drum than the sound of a muddy bass guitar any day the kick always has priority in pop music so in the interest of clarity bass guitar is often turned down which is unfortunate damn those drummers thinking they're all cool with their kick drum makes me sick what is the hardest and most complicated song you have ever learned i mean this probably wasn't the most complicated but that jay-z deep fake meme music that we made last week uh this is the sheet music yeah it was it was hard to play it was very hard to play what are your thoughts on competitive music as a beatboxer i take part often well i love the idea mainly because of the community building as long as it's not toxic it pushes people to work on their craft and learn from other people as well and as long as there isn't any bad vibes happening in the community i don't see why competitive music making is a bad thing now judging who is the best is rather tricky here right because then you have to treat music as a sport and it isn't a sport but besides that i don't actually think it's that bad how do you prefer listening thai music vinyl digital cd etc i mean i hate to say it this way but i mostly stream spotify is terrible for musicians but as a consumer of music that's how i do it mostly i mean technically yeah it's better audio quality to listen on nice monitors in a treated room through like 24-bit audio or whatever but i'm a musician not an audiophile and i actually don't know of any musicians who are audiophiles i don't know why that might be but i'm pretty sure the venn diagrams of the two don't overlap that much maybe it's because like all the details that audiophiles really like to hear in music are things that musicians don't like to hear like all the imperfections what are some cool jazz bars clubs in new york one should definitely check out well you can't really do much right now i know smalls is doing live streams and maybe also rockwood music hall 55 bar is occasionally doing these outdoor concerts and i played bass in one of them a couple of weeks ago today i'm gonna be sitting in a session at the 55 bar [Music] check out 55 bar if you want to support the local music scene and make sure that musicians can continue musicing in the way that they have been for forever what does it mean when music is tight it can't be that it's just exactly on the grid viz house to me tight does not mean quantized aligned to a grid perfectly metronomic if you look at a waveform of say even a kick drum there is the point where the waveform begins and then also the point of its highest amplitude so the question is when you're quantizing when you're trying to line everything up to mathematically perfect rhythm where do you put the sound of the kick drum at the beginning of the sound or at its highest amplitude there isn't any right answer here but they both have different feelings and both might lead to different feelings of so-called tightness that's the beauty and the humanness of music making that i think it's lost when you just press quantize on your digital audio workstation is electronic jazz a thing why yes if you'd like to check out my band sungazer i would consider us electronic jazz ever planned on playing with the lucky chops so yeah back in april my other band aberdeen was going to be on tour and we would have played with lucky chops but then the pandemic happened i'm friends with those guys i was on their live stream a couple months ago so yeah i'm sure someday it will happen but damn pandemics suck is there such thing as polytempo i.e different instruments playing at different tempos at the same time yes of course there definitely is as any middle school or high school band director would be very willing to tell you but in more serious situations you will find polytempo one of my favorite examples of it comes from my friend brian crock on his album big heart machine there's a tune called dipsy steps where the drummer is keeping a very steady tempo but the rest of the band is shifting in and out in these different textures it's very modern jazz by the way the drummer on the record is josh bailey because josh bailey plays drums on every recording i've ever heard ever how do you record the sound for your gig vlogs the sound quality is really impressive it really depends sometimes i'm able to get a board mix sometimes i'm able to set up a zoom recorder and then route microphones to it but most of the time i'm mixing a combination of the shure vp83 condenser mic attached to my camera and this gopro which actually has decent audio and records in stereo if you set the gain right this gopro gets the low end information for my bass and then this gets like the punchy mid-range and the combination of the two sometimes can sound pretty decent if the volume of the gig is not too loud thoughts on julian lodge oh man julian lodge is a fantastic guitar player definitely check out his live at the blue whale recordings because his playing is just on another level oh my gosh incredibly sensitive incredibly musical just so good play the lick have you ever looked at the band wolf peck they are very epic we did it guys we found the most adam neely comment that has ever been left on any of my videos or my instagram um this is beautiful i think i'm gonna frame this on the wall after this video how do you feel about non-music related adjectives woody beefy thick glassy to describe music well we only really have two forms of vocabulary to talk about music we have the technical music theory side of things like oh hey yes he was using an altered dominant scale on that 5 7 flat 9 and it sounded well what did it sound like did it sound spicy did it sound angular what was the sound of the alter dominant scale on that 5 7 flat 9. that's where the second side of the vocabulary comes in where we use things like punchy or glassy or whatever and that other kind of vocabulary that sensory vocabulary is always describing other senses other than our hearing in fact there are very few adjectives in the english language anyway that are exclusive to hearing so this kind of sensory vocabulary is necessary honestly because we don't have any other way of describing our thoughts and our feelings and our experiences about music unless we use words like thick are memes a viable form of music education well that was the entire idea of me starting the 7 11 polyrhythm challenge where i challenged people to play a 7 against 11 poly rhythm in a 7-eleven that of course inspired the viral video of a guy doing just that on july 11th in order to take part you have to practice there is no way around that it is an expensive meme the lick is a cheat meme because it's easy to produce but i think the opportunity here in music education is to develop expensive memes the mario kart lick is an expensive meme giant steps is an expensive meme anybody who wants to inspire and teach creating challenges around meme ideas is just a really great way of engaging people to challenge themselves and also learn more about music and what makes it tick micro tonal lo-fi is cool and all but can you produce atonal lo-fi i'm not sure if the world is quite ready for that yet someday though someday there will be if you enjoyed this video please consider joining my patreon because the patrons over at my patreon that make this channel possible and uh yeah guys thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 255,919

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: xcqnw3U3NG8

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020