Alternatively if anyone lives near Manchester UK and is interested in the music give me a shout!

Hi,

My honest opinion is that you do not need a bass or keyboards on this piece, as it seems to me that you both did things really nice and well enough to stand up on its own. You might need to use a few musicians, if you have to perform this somewhere, I would guess, but ... for my tastes, at this moment, I would rather have the feeling that it has right now, and not spread it out with more folks that might not understand or catch up with where you both are at.

If I have one comment, and this is just me, and please do not take it with so much salt and pepper that you gag and throw up ... but I would like to recommend a few bits and pieces here on the drumming cleaned up so that he is not just "keeping time" and using the same snare and hi-hat non stop. I might even recommend listening to the John Bonham drumming breakdown, so there is an example of some different things that can be done with drumming, that are not just keeping track of the time, which you can do with a mechanical something or other, and this would allow the drummer to do more than just keeping time for you ... I think, it would be best to allow you both total freedom. Another fun example, but probably harder to break down, is listening to Tangerine Dream in their last few albums (just get Supernormal) and see how the lady adds syncopated drums to her own beat ... and while I would love to see more variety from her, what is with her in the background is superb.

One example of drummer and keyboards (not guitar in this example) catch on to "Seventh Wave" and their sublime two albums so that you can get the idea that more musicians are not always necessary to create something original.

I like this piece of music, and am on the second listen already!

Sometimes. My dentist is actually a fairly well known bass player here in Portland, and took lessons for years from the guy in "Oregon". He has worked on my teeth, while we have played Egberto Gismonti (He became enamored with latin/Brazilian rhythms and now moonlights with a salsa band!), and Tangerine Dream. And his wife tells me the stories of his taking his bass around on vacation to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro ... and how much fun he had playing all over ... 

It's not HOW the suggestion comes, since it may come via Mac Truck, your child, your wife, a slap in the face ... it's by the love and care it is given and suggested ... it does not mean things have to change, but sometimes adding a different idea to it .... is possibly a good addition to the music, even if it makes it a bit more progressive and harder to do live ... which many bands nowadays are too lazy to do, and just keeping a beat going is the simplest and lowest level of education for any musician. 

How much do you want to grow?

It's not for me to tell you ... however, sometimes the cobwebs are harder to remove! And forgetting what you learned 50 thousand years ago, and updating it, is not wrong .. or right ... yes, it's a matter of taste, but if all you want to do is sound like everyone else ... good luck in your career and having a better chance at being noticed!

tehdanzorz wrote: I'm happy hearing any opinions on it really, and tackling the keys myself with VST's is my current last resort. My fear with that is that it will sound too disconnected with what the other instruments are doing, I think the human touch on prog records is what makes them sound so good. Would be great as well to be able to perform this live as well. Glad you enjoy it!

Thanks. As I said it's not about the salt and pepper ... And yes, I would agree that people might make it more interesting, but to me, that's like saying that Mike Oldfield, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Edgar Froese, Brian Eno, Jean Michel Jarre ... need other musicians, and they don't. 

Music is music ... and my point is that you have to be YOU ... not someone else, to make your piece more coherent and clear on its own, and sometimes, dispersing it with others, may have (MAY HAVE) a tendency to spread the idea too thin, and lose the spark that created it. It may sound "better", but the spark is slilghtly gone, and it does not feel the same.

As a writer of poetry and many reviews of foreign films and books on musicians and artists, I have never been able to duplicate (in 45 years) the ORIGINAL moment that created something, specially in a poem and this is an important consideration ... you can fix the English (as I say) ... but the original feeling will be remembered, but never duplicated ... it's a different time and place.

If you remember this, the originality of your piece stands up a lot more, than changing it a thousand times, and adding folks to it, that were not there at the start. That's not to say that they can not add something else to it, but then ... there goes the original idea ... and the point of the original idea for the artist, painter and musician, is to CLARIFY what they saw ... and it's harder with externals, than your own "internals" (as I call it). 

This happens to me in various chapters when writing a novel (on my 4th) and all of a sudden the character/s want to go left ... and I thought they all wanted to go ... that way ... and while the freshness of the movement changes the story, in the end, it's about the WHOLE STORY, not just one piece of it, and it did not change things as much as I thought. Now, if I am to add a vacuum cleaner out of the blue because I thought that a bass guitar might be interesting ... well, if I'm going to do that, at the very least I will only bring in a Eberhardt Webber or a Charlie Haden, or a Nick Beggs, or a Don Schiff .. so at the very least I know that they will create something that is special ...

There is always Bass Pedals ... and another old style Roland out there, no? 

Sorry about the tone, but I stand up for my art, even though some folks love to say that music is different than other arts ... like saying that there is no feeling in one, but there is in the other! It's all about the inner feeling and how well you can emulate it and bring it alive ... the more you do, the better you will be represented and found!

The next step if nothing happens, is offer to pay a music school student ( who 's curious to see how real life feels as a pro musician ) for a couple of gigs, and if you're lucky, that professional relationship can develop into a real relationship.

Davesax1965 wrote: Javem, alas, theoretically a good idea, but music school students don't - in general - have the experience or depth of knowledge to play like that. Take the sheet music away and they sink. Could be done, but.... unless they were prog fans, it'd really show.

Most musicians never get near step three. Probably a few percent. The safety net of playing tablature and other peoples' tunes is something they can't imagine being taken away. 

Really, it's "how deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole ? " - and there are more distractions in modern life - and pressure of having to work full time. All of these stop ... players... becoming musicians. 

Manchester and it's environs is full of bands who want to ... just play tab and be famous. It's not always been the case, but there's a lot of distractions here. Liverpool, for obvious reasons, has arguably a more thriving music scene. There are a few pockets dotted around the UK (obvious places like London) where you can easily find people to jam with, but it's not universal. 

My particular stomping ground, half an hour south of Manchester, is pretty much a musical desert. 

Hi,

I'm of the opinion that youth is what makes music what it EVENTUALLY becomes. They have the energy and (sometimes) dream, to do something they see and want to do, and not as many folks are enamored with doing covers and learn tab. I lived with a band in Santa Barbara for the better part of my college career at UCSB, and they were working hard on doing their own material, and played it many times on the small circuit in Santa Barbara tri-county area (California), instead of doing some hits, or some known stuff.

Eventually, when the band were ripped off in Portland, OR, it broke up and its drummer, who already was a singer, joined a cover band and did the circuit for a while and his band even made it to the Hard Rock Cafe in Memphis, doing their originals, and only a cover or two.

I'm the son, of a very well known writer in Portuguese Literature. Nothing major there, like the pulp fictioned King or Rowland, but a serious writer of poetry and critical works on various thing, and we lived in a house with 40K books of Portuguese, Spanish and Brazilian Literature ... and while in that house the "professorial" side of things were strong, my dad never wavered on the younger generations and their ability to mix and match ... effects and ideas that otherwise would not be done. That Library, now buried somewhere in Lisbon amidst rats and rubble I bet, had more new writers and books that even various universities around the country that had the studies (Stanford, UCLA, Brown and a couple of others specially), did not have a complete index, and now they will never get it! There .. another example of hiding the new work. Sooooo much like the previous government in Portugal (and Spain) that made a point of hiding, and getting rid of anyone that thought differently, and wanted to do something not politically correct!

Imagine a young Picasso painting "Guernica" and the academic folks that see it, think its crap ... you just about kill the artist, but the young man did not quit. The same for many artists in the 20th century.

I always state, that in many ways, studying the HISTORY of the arts, is a good thing, not for they have this and they have that, but for the social content and difference, which is the reason why they are noticed.

You are supposing that the academic knowledge teaches a youngster to be different, and that is the very last thing that the majority of educational studies are about ... you will not get a senior project to take you to grad school by creating your own composition ... you have to di-sect someone else's work instead to justify your studies and knowledge of the art ... and this, while it should be appreciated, in many ways, is counter productive to the creative mind ... go tell Jimi Hendrix to lay off the weird stuff ... go tell Jim Morrison to stop with the bizarre movie lyrics adn lines ... go tell Grace to stop being a bitch on stage ... go tell Janis to stop being so wild and drunk ... it takes away their vitalilty and their strength ... and you are saying that a professor/teach is the one person that can change that ... as I like to say ... go get married and lose your strength and wildness ... because now you have to work and help keep house ... your dream gone ... and now DOMESTICATED.

Nothing against the institution of marriage, some are magnificent to the youth of the arts, but in general, there is something here, in the concept and idea of creativity ... that is not the history of any of the arts ... and I didn't write that history! It is there, for anyone to see and study if they want ... but if you want to learn from the masters, the one thing you have to forget and do, is ... letting them go!

You decide, how innovative you are, in the end. The "knowledge" of all this tends to dilute your vision and desire, and you end up sounding like someone else ... and not yourself ... and therein is the difference.

Davesax1965 wrote: I just love it when non musicians tell musicians all about music.  It's really, really useful to hear the *opinions* of others, which are so much more useful than one's own *knowledge*.  I'll stop some small children in the street and see what they think, at some point.

Mostly it's about the ART of it all ... which is not different in music, from literature or painting ... this is the parallel that you are failing to see. It does not mean music, or art, or acting, or writing is any better than the other art form ... they are all comparative in their own way, and this is your fear. That someone can see into your secret ... and in the end, there is no secret to the art ... there is only DOING.

Pedro, why do you think Ginger Baker has a notoriously short temper ?