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musical pet peeves


SuperFreq

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Just a lighthearted thread to vent. I'm sure a lot of people might enjoy the stuff that makes my eyelid twitch. But for the sake of us music makers, how about a list of things that bother us about popular music.

1. People who play a lame harmonica, just because it's there.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Bob Dylan. And basically anyone who uses one of those Darth Vader harmonica neck straps. Nobody wants to hear you inhale & exhale your 2 chords that sound like a drunk weasel gettin busy on a pair of uggs. Instead think of hiring a real harmonica player, those guys rock. Compare Billy Joel Piano Man harmonica (eyetwitch galore) with his follow up Leave A Tender Moment Alone where he got the amazing Toots Thielemans to smoke a mean comb. Now that's what I'm talkin bout.

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  • 2 months later...

1 - Double, tripled and quad tracked guitars. You're a guitar player, we get it. Now leave space for the other instruments to be heard in the mix.

2 - Songs which have tons of bass everywhere, yet you can't hear a single note of what the bass player is doing.

3 - Everything has to be layered, epic, hit you like a truck and other adjectives. Well, if everything in your song is massive, nothing is massive.

4 - Despite several advancements in sampling technology and plugins, some people just manually place samples in the grid, then spend hours getting them to line up right, slice them, and so on. And no, you don't get more control by doing that.

3 - Some tutorials or hacks will teach you how to make your drum sounds more realistic by telling you to shift everything by an exact time figure. There's no difference between being locked to the grid and locked to the grid + some timing offset. Your drums still sound fake, but now they're 10 ms off or something like that.

5 - It's a bit sad there are still people asking how to make drum parts that sound more realistic when the vast majority of drum sounds in the last 20 years is gated and isolated to the point it sounds like a drum machine. And these people are gonna take their realistic drum parts and do exactly that anyways.

6 - The cicada hi-hat. It's in everything everywhere nowadays and it's always the same pattern.

7 - Beat producers. So, you're gonna tell me you spent all that time, money and effort learning how to make music only to produce 30 second loops just like the ones you keep buying off the internet to produce more loops?

8 - Endless talk about dynamics this and dynamic that, then you just shove at least 2 compressors in every track, including fx sends.

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In the amateur world:

- Solo piano compositions based on I, IV, V triads played (or worse yet, step-sequenced) on a freebie VST.

- The endless hours people spend trying to "humanize" sequenced parts that could be so much better spent learning to play a MIDI keyboard/controller in real time.

In the professional world:

- AUTOTUNE!!!

 

 

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