Abundance of one-man "bands" in modern prog

I have 50 other albums, they are by and large a lot less orchestral or contemporary Art Music influenced, that wasn't the reason for using that album as an illustration. There are many examples of music that fails to fit a traditional rock and roll "combo" format produced by bands, ensembles or collectives of musicians that still rocks - the whole genre of RIO/Avant-Prog chamber music, a sizeable portion of Post Rock and some contemporary Psyche Prog discards the traditional rock-band format (drums, bass, rhythmn & lead) and still produces rock music, even Prog Electronic bands like Tangerine Dream manage to eschew the rock-format and still managed to produce Progressive Rock (such as Force Majeure).

 

Gerinski wrote: One-man guys trying to make a more traditional rock-oriented prog are more likely to suffer the potential pitfalls of the one-man format.

I make no distinction, it is perfectly possible to make rock music as a one man band, I choose not to simply because I find the format to be restrictive. While it seems that this doesn't appeal to you (and a few others here) and you seem to find it lacking in some way, I see nothing amiss or lacking in what those guys (okay, not me) are producing. The premis that you have to be a bass player to compose a bassline is one I struggle to comprehend, yet the notion that as a one-man band you can tell the imaginary bass player to shut up for five minutes and not play a note is one that appeals to me, just as the idea of telling Portnoy, Collins or Peart not to hit the cymbals during this album, or again, to shut up for five minutes and not make a sound would possibly be an improvement in some cases.

I agree with this and this is the difference between someone who is using the tools that computers provide perhaps for the first time before they have come to terms with the possibilities and limitations that they provide. We all think we're pretty good at keeping time, when playing alone either for amusement or practice we tap our foot or nod our head to keep time and count in our heads (one-e and-a two-e and-a three-e), we may even continue to do this when jamming with others while following the tempo laid down by the drummer or bass player or rhythm guitar, or following a guide-track we recorded previously, but that pace is never constant, it speeds up and slows down even when we're following a score or tab or a chart. This is one of the roles of a conductor in an orchestra, to keep the tempo, to mark time, a human click track (in the Tom Dowd documentary that Pedro refers to there is a wonderful section of Dowd conducting a band during a recording session).

 

Seeing the recorded waveform on a computer screen shows how "off" we can be and that presents us with four simple options - leave it as recorded, have another go, tweak it to fit (quantisation) or re-record it against a metronomic click or guide track. The choice we make is one of preference and experience. Personally I don't like quantisation of either note pitch or note timing, it's just a little too artificial even when allowing a little free-form slack in how the software adjusts each note - in all my recordings I never used it - if I can't hit the tempo and it sounds wrong I'll re-record the part, if it sounds right I'll leave it, regardless of how far off the beat the display says I am. A click-track is just to boring to play against, too reminiscent of hours spent listening to the tick of a metronome when learning to play (fine for a drummer perhaps, though most good drummers seem to carry that click in their heads, that's what makes them good drummers); If a click is a necessity (and sometimes I believe it is, some peices I wrote need precision from an artistic point of view - for example when creating phasing like in Steve Reich's Electric Guitar Phase) I think it is better if a human records a simple guide-track using one instrument that will be discarded later (or in the example of phasing - two guide tracks) - that second-generation timing is more natural, more creative and more artistic. Once you've laid-down that first track (whether you use a DAW or an analogue studio) you have set the timing and tempo of your final piece, every subsequent instrument and track-layer you record is dictated by that first track, you now play to that guide or to the rhythmn track recorded to that guide, not the bar-lines on the screen or the tick of a metronome.

 

Even in studio software and (spit) Cubase the bars-lines are there as a guide and a reference, you don't have to use them, you can still play 3/4 time against a 4/4 score, you can still record polyrhymns and polymeters and weird and wacky time signatures - the counting is in your head (or your tapping foot), not on the computer screen. Sure you can be a slave to the technology, or you can just use it as another tool in your musical utility belt.

 

Certainly I do think that some musicians who approach digital studio for the first time can be beguiled by the precision of the tools and can allow themselves to be dictated to, just as a beginner will hammer mechanically away at the keyboard as they follow a score while listening to the click of a metronome, but that will pass, they will get better with experience and begin to impose their feeling and expression onto the music they make.

 

If Tony Banks played on the beat then that was his artistic choice, he is a musican who has played with a band on stage and in the studio almost as many times as I've had hot dinners, I'd be very surprised if he didn't know what he was doing.

 

TODDLER wrote: One aspect of this topic (which is quite sad)..is the dismissal or disregard of original unorthodox recording methods that are now replaced by buttons and samples. Beaver & Krause experimented with ideas in sound by setting up production in a real cathedral or recording sounds of children's laughter in a park. Seems a bit pointless to many who depend on samples. Other unorthodox recording methods such as slapping wet bath towels against a wall or slamming a mallet upon a kettle drum covered with cat litter were utilized in the content of a rock song. 20th Century Avant-Garde composers experimented with the same concept although technology was limited and they drew many of their influences from nature...as it wasn't a hippie invention but how musicians/composers had been engaging in this religion for centuries. To a large extent the spiritual and intense experiences change with modern technology. You rely only on buttons and samples you are missing a true educational experience that you can expand with to create many beautiful pieces.

Again, it's just a tool and for me opened up the possibilities for experimentation and unorthodox recording far beyond anything I could have done with a tape deck. My Portastudio DAW, while not exactly being portable, can be taken anywhere with mains electricity, I've recorded outside, in a disused cow-shed, in an underground water tank, in the rain, by a steam railway line; I've captured the dawn chorus at 5 am in the morning, the rhythmic thrum of passing traffic; the wind through an aeolian harp in my garden; the distant sound of church bells chiming a plain bob major and a drummer beating a rhythm on rusty oil drum in a farm yard. I've played my music through 50 feet of stainless steel wire and recorded the effect of the earth's magnetic field on that current together with the ambient sounds of semi-rural life and passing light aircraft and mixed that back with the original source recording. A sampler can take any found sound and transpose that up the chromatic scale to turn the sound of a drain pipe into a polyphonic instrument or it can be a barrage of percussion and noise from pot-lids to anvils recorded and played at the touch of a midi keyboard, I've sampled the ticks from numerous wind-up clocks and used them to make a drum kit, I've done the same with water dripping into buckets, pails, oil drums and that underground water tank. All of these recordings captured on my little digital DAW were then used raw or spliced, transposed, flipped, manipulated and jiggled and filtered and used just as they would have been using any multitrack studio, just a little easier that's all.

 

 

The point I am making with both these examples here is the tool is what you use, and to use it you need to learn it. Anyone who only sees or hears the limitations of that equipment are not seeing the full potential of what this technology can offer. If all you can hear is the received wisdom that this technology limits this or curtails that, then the unlimited capability of that technology has slid past you unnoticed - and so it should - you should be listening to the music, not the technology it was recorded on. Going back to Tom Dowd, he was recording stereo in the 40s when other studios were cutting mono direct to disc, yet even he was taken aback when he heard what Les Paul was doing - he could not work out how Paul was recording multipart harmonies from his guitar and his wife's singing in his home when everyone else would need three guitarists and three singers to achieve that at that time. The answer was the multi-track tape deck, and that revolutionised recordings from that moment on. The seemingly infinite number of tracks capability of digital studio has taken that a quantum leap further - the limitations are within the head of the musician and the studio engineer, not the technology.

 

Other than that you've missed the point by a country mile and there is simply no need to make wild excursions into Punk or Grunge. But no surprises there. Prog is not a boundary defined genre - if it were then Canterbury bands would not sit along side Symphonic bands or Psyche bands or Electronic bands or Jazz Rock/Fusion bands. If we could accurately define Prog as a genre then 90% of the bands we regard as Prog would not fit, including Caravan, Rush, Jethro Tull, Tangerine Dream, Magma, Mahavishnu Orchestra or even Pink Floyd.