June 4ths
6/4/1968
(Beatles Studio Diary)
A day of curious overdubs on “Revolution I”. John recorded his vocal lying flat on the floor. He was having hissy fits, claiming that the tape machine was always breaking down, and later apologized. Paul and George did background voices consisting of just the words “mama” and “dada”.
6/4/2017
One of my strategies is to “turn on the synths, and tune the guitars, and play and use the first thing you play”. This doesn’t last long because the “System 2” behaviors quickly take control, as they should. If I “surrender” all the time, and keep using these ideas, it will make for terrible work. So I say, stay in System 1 as long as possible, then go into System 2. At some point in System 2, let System 1 take control again, then finish.
6/4/2021
Music direction is a specific skill and requires management and leadership skills. If the musicians are for-hire this is easier to do because they are getting paid to follow directions.
The best leaders get the best results because they admire and respect the talents of the individual players. In my experience, a demo recording, plus lead sheets should be enough to get some satisfactory results. There have been times when I’ve written around the talents of specific players because they were so unique.
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New technologies are in some sense like Equal Temperament, which solved the problem of playing in different keys. and is essentially a compromise—you can’t divide 100 by 12 equally and consequently certain intervals are out of tune. So we accept that when you play a piano or fretted instrument, the major third is always slightly out of tune, but when you hear a perfect third it sounds better. When you listen to people singing together and they’re harmonizing, those are perfect thirds because they’re not segmented by frets, keys, or valves. New technologies have that same problem in which a compromise is the accepted norm and something is always going to be “out-of-tune”. That dissonance doesn’t matter in music but it matters in other industries. #riff
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