Why do horn players have TERRIBLE rhythm? | Q+A

this video was brought to you by curiositystream sign up today with the link in the description and also get access to my streaming service nebula for free [Music] can you explain the logic for the super fast q and a song please sure it was all about superimposing triplets against quintuplets the vocal rhythm is all in triplets superfast instagram qna but the groove and the bassline are all in this quintuplet swing i really like when triplets superimpose against quintuplets which create this five against three kind of feel there's something about that that feels really nice that i don't really get from other kind of polyrhythmic combinations but that was the main idea with the theme song theme song introduction is this like a sitcom why are horn sections often a little bit too late yeah horn players often play really behind the beat don't they almost to the point where it's too late i'm gonna ask my friend brian ploutz who leads the band aberdeen why horn players are just so rhythmically deficient hey hello why do horn players suck short answer i don't know long answer probably many reasons great so i think a lot of horn players focus heavily on improvisation more so than rhythm section players like that's their primary focus or at least people in my community i was looking at artists like dexter gordon who like has this really laid back feel so then when i started doing horn section work i had to kind of unlearn some of the things that i was learning for my rhythmic feel while improvising and then also something i thought of was maybe a lot of horn players started by um just like doing their school band programs and in band programs you're following the director and you're like following visual cues so i wonder if maybe that's a factor where porn players more often than maybe drummer is their basis maybe this is very general may have certain band programs where they're like relying on following more than dictating where the groove is and maybe anticipating so that might be a factor does beatboxing as a solo art have a space in the new york music scene i don't know a whole lot specifically about it but of course the beatboxer that i know and have worked with before is a guy by the name of jean shinozaki he has a group of beatboxers that call themselves the beatbox house and the reason why i know him is because he's worked a lot with apartment sessions the idea of course behind apartment sessions is to cram a bunch of musicians into a tiny cramped space a small brooklyn apartment and that concept has not aged very well in the past six months but back when it was happening it was a lot of fun the idea was that it would kind of be a melting pot for different musicians and styles in this kind of chamber orchestra setting and whenever gene joined that setting it was very interesting hearing how he incorporated vocal percussion into a more orchestral and classical [Music] setting [Music] i don't think too many composers have really done that before and really explored what vocal percussion in the tradition of beatboxing can really add to an ensemble but beyond that yes i think that beatboxing has a very strong presence here in new york city i've seen beatbox house perform at rockwood music hall and it's an amazing experience a beatbox crew sounds like a full band it sounds like a dj set it's incredible how do i make my guitar solos sound less like guitar solos okay you're going to make me play guitar now i see uh great oh why does anybody play this stupid instrument just look at it just [Music] how can anybody hear that and think this is what i want to do with my life you know what forget it uh just we're not we're not gonna do it we're gonna answer this question with me on bass as god intended so obviously don't play guitar but if you have to play a guitar it's a great book called the advancing guitarist by mick goodrick and there's an exercise in the beginning that he calls the science of the unitar essentially what that is is playing a solo just on one string and when you do that you don't have any of the licks and any of the muscle memory that you've developed as a guitar player over your entire guitar playing career again don't know why you'd have it but so you're focused more on the vertical side of the instrument rather than the horizontal side of the instrument vertical horizontal you get the picture so if i were to play like an e minor 9 on the g string [Music] i have to think very carefully about where my hand is moving up and down the neck you can kind of do this fun call and response thing by playing notes up high on the neck and then jumping down on the string and that sliding up and down feels very un-guitaristic that's a word it feels more sitaristic [Music] something to that effect favorite contemporary composer of the 21st century louis cole did you ever expect your channel to be this big god no and it is terrifying how would you resolve an a6 sharp 5 sharp 9 11 chord uh okay that is a hell of a chord let's try it let's talk about this chord shall we so the sharp five the sharp nine and the eleven of this a6 chord form what's looks like a g sus triad what's god's favorite chord g suss on the bottom there's a normal a6 chord which is very consonant but there's a lot of interval clashing occurring on top with this g sus one thing you can do whenever you have a really dissonant structure is resolve all the voices within that dissonance structure by a half step so if we have a g a c and a d in this chord the d could resolve up to d sharp the c could resolve down to b and the g could resolve down to f sharp giving us kind of an a 6 9 sharp 11. kind of creepy i like it though what's your favorite interval i like perfect fifths because you can stack them really high and they sound really pretty when they're stacked on top of one another and also minor knights live in la and want to pursue musical career stay la where have a network or study in new york it's actually a really great question because that's something that i think about all the time living in new york city do i stay here in new york and have this musical scene around me or do i move to la whenever i visited la for functions like namm or the entire industry gets together in one location the thing that's very apparent to me is that la is where the music industry is that's where the money is that's where the jobs are there are many many more people who work in the music industry than just the musicians themselves and so that's where the pop industry is that's where the film scoring industry is there's so much industry there new york has a fantastic musical scene but there is just really no money to be made specifically in new york unless you're doing weddings most of the money is just musicians giving each other 50 bills after gigs studying in new york city though i think is a wonderful experience for young musicians being exposed to jazz or at least that's how it used to be in the before times but i think things will definitely start to kick up again this spring the before times i like people are saying that so unironically now it's actually getting kind of scary anyway new york is a great place if you want to be a musician but la is where the industry is brazil so yeah peruvian chicken give me some polio alabrasa with some inca cola and i i'm set man i love this stuff if you don't know what inca cola is by the way don't worry i am also gringo but it smells kind of like cotton candy but tastes like pure sugar it's amazing it goes very well with peruvian chicken this has nothing to do with music by the way but it's something that you should really know about me thoughts on christian lee yeah christian lee is an amazing keyboard player he's touring keyboard player for sungazer he also plays with childless japes occasionally just a great musician i always learn a lot whenever i get the chance to play with christian lee he always has a unique approach to evoking a particular feeling and a particular emotion like a visceral bodily emotion with his harmony and with his piano playing and i've never really heard or seen anything like it when we were touring he always used to play this outro to our tune drunk and there is something about how he played the outro which made it feel almost micro tonal even though he was just playing on a regular 12 tone equal tempered keyboard the way he was able to improvise voice leading the same way that we voice led that g sus chord earlier had a very particular feeling to it and he was very good at tapping into that feeling and i think that is an important thing for any improviser is to tap in to the feeling of whatever notes you're playing it seems like it's an obvious thing but honestly when we get so bogged down into all the harmonic language that we learn and we use as jazz musicians we sometimes forget what music feels like what are double sharp double flats used for so there's a rule that music teachers very rarely teach you when you're first learning the basics of western music notation and it's actually very important i'm not sure if it even has a technical name but i'm going to call it the alphabetical rule because it involves notes in alphabetical order for every seven note scale you must name each note in alphabetical order so any scale starting on an a whether it's a flat or a sharp or whatever will read a b c d e f g no matter what this will never change some form of b will always follow from some form of a so say we take the hypothetical key of a sharp major we start on an a sharp and the next note in the scale would be a c right except we can't call it a c because of the alphabetical rule it has to be some form of b so we have to call this note which looks like a c a b sharp so what comes after b sharp well it looks like a d on the piano but because of the alphabetical rule it has to be some form of c so it's not going to be c sharp it's going to be c double sharp yes the double sharp sign looks very strange it looks like a weird x or a weird cross i could not tell you why it looks that way maybe just because two sharps in a row might look a little too messy i think it looks pretty cool but there we go now this alphabetical rule has some pretty profound ramifications once you start getting into certain note names and chord symbols and other things diminished seventh chords for example can be a complete mess when you're trying to name things the correct way also octatonic scales scales which have eight notes or more don't follow this alphabetical rule they can't because there are only seven note names and these scales have eight notes so how could you only have one version of each note name anyway the more you work with western notation the more you realize that it's just kind of all thrown together in this melting pot this hodgepodge of all these ideas that have just kind of accumulated over the thousand years of development the one thing though that remains relatively stable throughout all of that is this alphabetical rule the note names must be in alphabetical order and because of that you get these fairly strange situations where you have things like double sharps add dumb sorry parentheses we've reached peak humor here guys peak humor what's up dog never mind never mind that was not p humor this is peak humor behold why does a chord like f major seven over g resolve so nicely do you see heart smiley face emoji thing well that f major seven over g is kind of like a replacement for a g sus triad and because of that it has the tendency to have a dominant function and dominant function chords want to resolve in the western canon to tonic function chords in that case a c so this f major 7 over g resolves nicely to c because it follows the 5 1 cadential patterns of the western canon otherwise known as the harmonic styles of 18th century european musicians call back to last week's video we'll talk more about that later why do you think some people see video game music as not real music well i think it's very much tied to how traditionally film music was not even considered real music but even recently a certain crowd has been incredibly reluctant to accept film music as true music there was recently a review of john williams conducting his own film scores with the vienna philharmonic orchestra that gave the recording a zero star review so even the broader acceptance of film music in certain circles is a long way off never mind video game music i think it takes generations literally dying off before certain art forms are actually accepted in the general popular sphere as being quote unquote legitimate it sucks but i think one of the things that is really awesome about spaces like youtube is that you have a group of young musicians who are doing a lot to really canonize and categorize and celebrate video game music in a way where future generations will be able to look at video game music as a canon and as something worth preserving you got people like charlie rosen and the 8-bit big band you also have of course carlos from an insane and the rain music and many other musicians who are doing their best to elevate video game music to a real body of work it's gonna be a while but things are already starting to change from this niche little musical genre in this musical world to a broader accepted musical art form how to do music when your hand is damaged and haven't been able to play for two years i'm very sorry to hear that i hope that you have been enriching your life with music in as many ways as you can there is a long history of people who are not able-bodied who have been able to do great things in music of course there's django reinhardt who only famously had two fingers in his left hand there's a bass player by the name of bill clements who famously only has use of his left hand and so he's able to play bass simply by tapping with his left hand and it's pretty incredible to watch him play because he's developed a style that you simply can't really do with both hands it's unique to him it's awesome there's a famous concerto that the composer maurice revell composed called concerto for the left hand that was composed by an austrian pianist by the name of paul wittgenstein who lost his right hand in world war one so there are definitely creative ways of working within a physical limitation but one of the best things to happen to modern musicianship is the invention of a digital audio workstation digital audio workstations are probably the best thing to happen to music accessibility probably ever because there's such an infrastructure right now for accessibility and interfacing with computers that it really doesn't matter what your accessibility needs are they're probably going to be met so bust open garage band bust open ableton live start inputting notes start making beats i know it might not be what you got into music for originally but there's such a wide palette to work with does make it easy to do music no matter who you are and where you're coming from is hera better than the viper well i do really enjoy harris playing and i think that am winning the battle for africa was very good for the whole scene i have to say that i am a big fan of the snake who is the most creative person on the interwebs probably ben levin i think his stuff constantly pushes the envelope of what it means to be a youtuber and what it means to create social media art whatever that is how do you deal with jealousy as an artist performer so back when i was first learning how to play bass i learned how to read tabs from a website called mxtabs.com.net something like that the forums there really hated mark hoppus of blink182 they thought he was a complete hack he didn't deserve to have the fame and success that he did i'm not really quite sure why there was such a hatred from mark hoppus then it's not really in vogue to hate mark hoppus now but trust me back then mark hoppus was the worst human being on the planet if you're at mxtaps.com i think later it was pete wentz of fallout boy anyway i never really understood that hatred to be honest i mean i didn't think he was a great bass player but honestly i felt that kind of toxic hatred and toxic jealousy of somebody even back then when i was first starting out kind of defeated the point it didn't really make music fun this jealousy i feel like is always coming from a place of well why do they have the success that i don't have yet and i think it's important to consider that there's always a reason just or otherwise why somebody is where they are in their career they might have gotten lucky in one way or another you might not be recognizing what their talents are whether or not it's songwriting or performing or just in general being a good hang and the more you let go of your jealousy of others and other success the more room you have in your own life in your own career to focus really just on making yourself the best musician and best human you can be so mark hoppus wherever you are i'm so sorry for whatever dumb forum post i made when i was 15 years old railing against you and your band i think blink 182 is awesome sorry are platforms like nebula slash curiosity stream the ultimate solution for youtube dominance i do think for some people like myself uh the streaming service nebula actually does represent a pretty good alternative to youtube as a place to avoid demonetization and also any kind of algorithmic nonsense curiosity stream is today's sponsor alongside nebula which is the creator-owned streaming service that features many of youtube's top educational creators like for example thomas frank polyphonic legal eagle braincraft and many many more it's a great place to watch and discover quality content ad-free and also support your favorite creators you also get to watch an extended version of this video without the ad where i address some of the controversy from my most recent video on music theory and white supremacy and there is of course quite a bit of controversy around that one this video and nebula is supported by curiosity stream the best place on the internet to watch documentaries with thousands of titles to choose from if you sign up to curiosity stream with the link in the description or curiositystream.com adamnelly you'll also get a subscription to nebula for free what's more is that for a limited time a year of both curiosity stream and nebula will just cost you 14.79 at 26 discount by signing up to curiositystream with the link in the description you're not only going to be helping out this channel but the entire educational community here on youtube as we help build a platform and nebula for thoughtful content that engages the world in a meaningful way thanks for watching everybody and remember jesus loves you that's not a funny joke

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 802,910

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

Id: IzSL3MWJiUI

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020