Inspiration or copying?

[hurlingdervish]

I remember reading an interview with aphex twin saying he doesn't listen to a lot of other peoples tunes because it ends up tainting his notions of what a song is supposed to be like.

Makes sense, however sometimes you can get inspiration from a tune, but sometimes that inspiration is just you mimicking it through your own ways, which in all fairness has been responsible for some really great music ie: Led Zeppelin and some really terrible music ie: Rolling Stones

in an interview with fourtet he said that for a long time he tried to recreate sounds he heard, whereas now hes "trying to something genius of his own"

[ellaguru]

Makes sense, however sometimes you can get inspiration from a tune, but sometimes that inspiration is just you mimicking it through your own ways, which in all fairness has been responsible for some really great music ie: Led Zeppelin and some really terrible music ie: Rolling Stones

rolling stones 1965-70 are good.
led zeppelin 1969-1974 are good
aphex twin 1992-1998 is good
...ispiration comes and goes between conscious and unconscious...
...also in "bad music" there is "good music".
even in the worse hiphop,d'n'b,house,2step etc we can find some inspiration...

[niq names]

its kinda like ppl taking the same drug with different results...

u can listen to other cats all day and no be able to do what they do when u attempt to make music but u cna come up with a sound thats damn close and colored the way u like it....

as long as u dont pull no coldplay shyt...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44xirQ55IgA

[Chuck]

some really terrible music ie: Rolling Stones

Fucking blasphemy, HD!

rolling stones 1965-70 are good.

The Stones were good through the 70's too. Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile (1972) are fantastic albums!

[cartesia]

It doesn't necessarily do either, or both, or none..

I think it depends how impressionable you are, and how much your goals relate to how other people perceive, rather than just what you want to do.

[ellaguru]

some really terrible music ie: Rolling Stones

Fucking blasphemy, HD!

rolling stones 1965-70 are good.

The Stones were good through the 70's too. Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile (1972) are fantastic albums!

"exile on main street" is a fantastic album...but i prefer their psych-blues period: "beggar's banquet" and "let it bleed". anyway is not by chance that "beggar's.." and "exile.." were produced by the great jimmy miller, the 2 LP sound great.
peace

[Les Braun]

some really terrible music ie: Rolling Stones

Fucking blasphemy, HD!

rolling stones 1965-70 are good.

The Stones were good through the 70's too. Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile (1972) are fantastic albums!

Word. I got Sticky Fingers on LP with the real zipper on the cover, lol.

[hurlingdervish]

alright maybe there are some ok rolling stones songs...

but this song is in the top ten worst written songs ever

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th47siid6_k


same riff....over and over...and over...and over

[hurlingdervish]

but besides me being overexposed to classic rock stations at work....

we all are affected by predisposed notions of a what a song is supposed to sound like. in the most general ways that we don't even think aboout:

12 semitones in western music
intro-verse-chorus-verse-break-chorus-outro
having percussion
building up tension before the climax
melody on top of rhythm

what i wanted everyone to think about is this:
What would your music sound like if you have never heard music before?

[kel]

The only artist I try not to listen to for this reason is El-P.

[Andrew P]

everyone to think about is this:
What would your music sound like if you have never heard music before?

The Shaggs?

I think this is a good reason to have broad musical tastes, and one of the things that I like about electronic music, is that you can incorporate all sorts of influences and styles and take what you like out of all of them into a new sound, or push forward an existing one. I might listen to Flying Lotus a good deal, or Bad Brains, or whatever, but I also listen to a lot of shoegazer stuff, weird psych stuff, dub techno, ethnic folk, whatever, you see what I'm saying? Take a bit of everything and make something new! All music is a weird mutation on pre-existing forms and genres. The internet and globalism have a lot of downsides, but one of the upsides is exposure to new sounds.

[hurlingdervish]

everyone to think about is this:
What would your music sound like if you have never heard music before?

The Shaggs?

nobody could sound that bad on accident...

i think people would either be more tonal or more percussive depending on their personality, music to an extent is ingrained into us


obviously everyone should have diverse taste. i come from a jazz/funk background so i get down with dave holland and mahavishnu orchestra now and again, and epic stuff like sigur ros and explosions in the sky

i remember this kid asking for beats and i asked him what his influences were as a rapper and he said eminem...and only eminem...thats all
that kid also broke my axiom 61

[Nothingless1987]

i think when your starting out (whether as an emcee or beat smith) it's inevitable that your gonna taint your style with your main influences, especialy when your young. but as you develop your skills, your own flavour is bound to come out in your music with time.

[Hot Sauce]

we are all so influenced by our surroundings that we can never turn back from it. certain music sounds right to us because we're so used to the formula being used again and again and again.

music is my life. i listen to it all the time and when i'm not listening to it i'm talking about it or making it. but if you asked me to name some of my favourite CURRENT artists i think i'd struggle to name more than 10. one of the reasons i hate genre tags is because of the elitism which you find within these genres. people like something so they surround themselves with it and by doing so insulate themselves from everything else as they close themselves off to other ideas.

we all are obviously going to be influenced by others but wheter or not that is a bad thing is up to personal interpretation. some people are more than happy to sit within the confines of a given musical genre wheras others like to expand and create works that have cross-over appeal. although it could be argued that these cross-over styles are just a mish-mash and don't offer anything new and in fact are just sub-par imitations sewn together.

avant-garde music is shit.

[Les Braun]

It's like starting graffiti.
I know a few writers who started by copying some graffiti alphabets they found online, and developed their own styles.