June 4ths
6/4/1886
(Thomas Sullivan Diary)
Heavy rains, a flood of mud. Congress likely to pass the Fourteenth Amendment—citizenship for all born here. Southern states already protesting.
6/4/1944
(Naples 44)
Book Excerpt Library: "Discuss the events of June 4"
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”.
6/4/1995
Finished Tube Voyeur
[AI-generated versions]
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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
6/4/2024
Some extracted words from 6/4 entries as a kind of poem or lyric. Perhaps I am on the cusp of something and this is a synchronistic moment. (The feel is a tresillo 8/8 and the chords are Dm and E7, perhaps a tango...perhaps I should do something in 6/4)
On the edge
Flat on the floor
Afternoon light
Coming through the door
Beautiful sunset on the sea
At the edge of illusion and reality
6/4/2025
We cannot forget that this world is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin — the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I — notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.--W.E.B. Du Bois.
AI-generated songs aren't really songs--they're recordings of possible songs. No one could actually perform them, and if they did, they wouldn't sound the same. This is why your lyrics are so important: It's the point at which the music is intensely human--even more so than through instruments--even wind instruments. Also, I'm just now seeing the edge of what might be the end of AI music in its current form because the models are now starting to generate similar-sounding tracks. It's not the models themselves, but the fact that pop music is sonically finite, or there are 2 producers who make it all.
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