One and one and one is three.

On Guitars and Nature

An acoustic guitar is made of wood–a raw material wrought by a plant after decades of patient growth. Various types of trees yield various types of wood, and each type of wood yields a different tone when incorporated into a guitar’s construction. Maple top on mahogany causes a different resonance than rosewood on swamp ash. It’s the timbre of timber.

There is also the visual nature of the timber to consider: the swooping grains and reddish golden brown variances. And a quick whiff of the “sound hole” will claim another sense to overwhelm. An acoustic guitar entirely subject to the personality of the wood used in its creation, and can be a total sensory experience.

But there is another element to the instrument as well: the metal. Metal, the kind used to create a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, is intensely man-made. The tuning knobs are chromed, the frets are hammered, and the strings, as their names suggests, are made of steel. Steel is the alloy that has enabled the construction of skyscrapers and bridges, and its prevalence is the surest indicator of economic progress. Steel is a metal forged by fire and implemented by machine.

But together, wood and steel create something sublime and entirely representative of the human experience. Metal and wood. Man and Nature. Rather than being separate elements, in the form of a guitar they both work toward the same goal of producing music. And music is nature’s sound filtered through human creativity.

Nowadays it seems that man is in constant conflict with the natural world, struggling desperately to carve out a place in it with cement and girders. I like to think that the guitar is a glimpse of what can happen when that struggle ceases…

We Are All Rock Stars…

Truth in advertising from Channel V.

Live Music Archive

Since we’re in the thick of the summer concert season, I thought I’d share The Live Music Archive.

It’s a community sharing high-quality recordings of concerts that you can download. They only feature “trade-friendly” artists (those that encourage the recording and sharing of their live performances).

Some of last week’s top downloads were Jack Johnson’s Bonnaroo performance this past June, a 311 performance in 1996, and a Maroon 5 show in 2004. I also found some shows from Blind Melon, Ryan Adams, Smashing Pumpkins, and, as you might expect, a lot of Grateful Dead.

In addition to this website, there are band-specific communities all over that have organized similar concert offerings. For example, here is a Dave Matthews Band community sharing an impressive amount of concert recording from this summer’s series, as well as shows dating back to 1994.

With the advent of BitTorrent technology, up-and-coming bands could do well to encourage the formation of these types of communities to help spread their music and grow their fanbase.

Musical Surgery

A man named Peter Neubäcker has invented software that can edit a single note of a chord. In doing so, he has brought Pro Tools-style editing and perfectionism to a whole new level.

The software is called Direct Note Access, and you can read about it here. The notion that now entire chords and polyphonic sequences can be exact and precise simply begs a question asked previously when Pro Tools became prevalent. Who actually wants perfection in music?

The greatest music–soul, blues, jazz, classical, hip hop, country, and everything in between–is always injected with emotion and humanity which, in practical terms, comes down to imperfections. Bent notes, distinct tremolo, an individual’s interpretation of ritardando… all the elements of music that can’t be written down relies on interpretation, and individual interpretation is what lifts good music up to great music.

Keep your software. Let’s just do another take.

The Countries: A Song

A cartoon singing geography. Cultural synthesis of the highest order.

Money for Creating

On BlogSounds I recently featured a great web application over at Hobnox.com. They, in turn, brought to my attention a contest they’re running for musicians, filmmakers, and artists. It’s intriguing, so I wanted to pass the word along:

You can win up to $90,000 for creating something. Here’s a link to the contest.

The idea of giving someone money for doing what they already do for free is a rare thing indeed. Hobnox strikes again.

Music’s Hidden Dimension

When you play middle-C on a piano, you are not just hearing the note middle-C. You’re also hearing E, G, another C an octave higher, the D and E above that, F#… You’re hearing several different notes sounding simultaneously, all part of a single note.

It’s called the Overtone Series (also referred to as the Harmonic Series). Its implications are far-reaching: In my list of notes above, notes that the first 3 overtones of the note C are C, E, and G. These three notes form a “C-chord.” C is the tonic note, E is the third, and G is the fifth. The overtone series forms the foundation of Western music’s concept of harmony and chord structures. In this example, the note C is referred to as the “fundamental” of the series.

Overtones are also part of a note’s “timbre” or tonal coloring. Timbre is an instrument’s sound. It’s why a D# on a clarinet sounds different from a D# on a guitar. (”formants,” the resonating aspects of an instrument, also play a part.)

All of this seems somewhat logical, but the fact remains that a single note played on a musical instrument is not a single note at all–it is many notes. Our ears resolve an entire overtone series into one, single tone. Not only that, if you were to play the entire overtone series of C simultaenously, but leave out the note C, our ears will still hear everything as “C.” It’s as if our ears fill in the gaps where they expect the fundamental to be. The notes E, G, D, G, F#… all imply “C” in the world of harmony.

Why? How? These are deceptively deep questions about the nature of sound and human evolution and, like all deep questions, don’t yet have an answer…

tinySONG

Go to http://www.tinysong.com

Type in the name of a song.

A link is generated and automatically copied to your clipboard.

Paste link in browser.

Listen to song.

It’s a quick, simple way to share music with friends. Enjoy.

Hemingway and Violins

“Mussolini plays on their admirable patriotic hysteria as a violinist on his instrument but when France and Jugo-Slavia were the possible enemy he could never really give them the full Paganini because he did not want war with those countries; only the threat of war.”

- Ernest Hemingway, in an article that appeared in Esquire magazine, September 1935.