After listening to the top 10 country songs over the past month I've realized that they've totally changed the format. They now employ a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/c-section/chorus. In other words, every song must have the catchy chorus, in order to make it to modern-country radio. It's all about the chorus. I mean, on EVERY SONG. It sure didn't used to be this way.

Trace Adkins has a tune which they play about his job, he has a guitar and sings Country music songs..

I wrote this song when I was 8...

This is not in my opinion a song that should be even considered for radio play or recording..Sorry Trace..

And I Like Trace Adkins !

The current lineup of singers so called Stars have somehow earned a spot in the 38 minute music lineup for each radio show hour..These radio producers are gonna play songs by this selected group regardless if it is worthwhile music or not. There is no room in the lineup for any new singer or songs..

I suspect most of the show jocks are not even listening..and I sight a perfect example, now done on almost all stations that play the Country top 40...

Brad Paisley..Mudd on the Tires..I happen to really Like Brads tunes and CD's..I guess so do many..

The highlight of this song is Brads Guitar solo at the end of the tune..the whole song builds up to this..but what do the jocks do ? They cut it off and talk over it ...!

As our beloved James Carville would say..

"It's a Quagmy-ya for sure"...

t

I think what some of us are trying to say is:

"Dammitt! Merle is still miles ahead of these jokers and they wont play him on the radio."

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If you're only exposure to music is modern country or rock radio, then you won't even know of all the great new and old music that is available.

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"You mean you're over 6 feet tall? Well, we just don't have any pants to fit you, sir. The highest our inseams go is 32."

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Well said, Dave, and if you don't mind, one other salient point:

"Waistline greater than 30"? Sorry, sir, can't help you."

[This message was edited by James Cann on 03 April 2005 at 12:31 PM.]

I, like many other forumites, believe that it's been a long time since any really good original music has been produced, in any popular music genre.

I'm not saying that there isn't any good music being produced today. There is. But it's been a long time since a newly written song has struck me as being both really good and really original.

There will be some, as there always are, who will vehemently deny this. They will claim that new music is just as good as ever and that people who think otherwise are just old fogies who are remenicsing about "the good old days."

I'm beginning to believe that we are currently in the waning days of the era of great, original popular music (of all genres).

As for reason(s) why -- I think the answer is very complex and intertangled.

You may laugh at this, but I've said it before and I'll say it again -- there are only so many notes in a musical scale. Therefore, it follows logically that there is only a finite number of ways to combine those notes into good, original melodies (or guitar licks, for that matter).

Combine this with the fact that life goes on. "What does that have to do with anything?" you may ask.

Well, my point is simply that life is changing and it's changing extremely quickly. The saying that "nothing stays the same" has never been more true than right now.

So how does that relate? Well, there was a time when beaver skin hats were all the rage -- so much so that entire economies were built on fur trapping.

Fast forward to today -- is animal fur still around? Sure it is. Is there still an animal fur industry? Sure there is, and there probably always will be one, but it's nothing like is once was.

So, the point is that life changes and peoples' needs, interests, and perspectives change over time. Things come and go.

Is there still a music industry? Sure there is... ...and there probably always will be.

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Emmons S/D-10, 3/4, Sessions 400 Ltd. Home Grown E/F Rack
"ROCKIN COUNTRY"

The assumption is that a typical 'song-fragment' is about 200 notes long. Each of these 200 notes could take the value of any one of the 12 tones in the Western scale or a rest. If we were to consider all possible ways of selecting those 200 notes, the number of possible unique 200-note 'song-fragments' would be approximately 6 followed by 222 (not 223 as I stated above) zeroes. This isn't the kind of number anybody can get their arms around physically. It makes Carl Sagan's "billions and billions" of stars in the universe seem like nothing. The number of grains of sand on earth? Insignificant.

Like a typical melody comprises 200 notes (!!!!!??) -- most good melodies I know of are only a few bars long and maybe a couple dozen notes at most

and that all 12 semi-tones would be used in a typical song (!!!!!!??) maybe so, but I'm not sure I'd want to hear the result.

Also, would the melody really be that different if you sang a given note an octave higher or lower? Maybe so, I don't know.

I would say an analogy would be something like declaring that since there are 26 letters in the alphabet and that a word can reasonably be up to about 20 letters long, then it follows that there should be 26^20 or roughly 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations of letters available for our daily usage -- and even more if we increase the number of letters in a combination. However, somehow I just don't think that has a whole lot of meaning or application....

... but, I definitely agree with the following:

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I realize that in practice, humans don't find many combinations of notes pleasing

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Yes, this is a very important fact to remember when attempting to craft a good tune. (and it's a very important point I was attempting to make above).

I'm sure that if somebody could come up with a good tune by simply trying every possible combination of notes, rests, tempos, etc., then they'd have written a computer program to do it and they'd have come up with a bunch of good songs by now.

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but really, there must be some good original tunes left

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Well, maybe there are some floating around out there somewhere. Somebody please let me know when you find one!

[This message was edited by Tom Olson on 08 April 2005 at 12:58 AM.]

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Zum U-12 w/True Tone pickup thru a Nashville 112

Strats thru a tweed Bassman

Band Pics
http://community.webshots.com/album/176544894AuXSmi

I also think that restricting a 'melody' to a choice of 20 notes is a bit limiting. I used 200 to allow for a "normal-length" verse/chorus. But even if we say 20, the number of distinct 'melodies' is 3833759992447475122176, around 3.8 x 10^21, which is approaching Avogadro's number, the number of atoms in a mole of a substance. Again, a tiny fraction of those is a lot more tunes than we can ever think of.

I'm only arguing against the proposition that there's some fundamental mathematical limitation to the number of reasonable tunes possible. If we're at the 'end of the era' of good, original music (a proposition I reject, BTW), I think there must be some other reason. We're limited only by our own minds, IMO.

Mark, I agree with you that Texas is probably the last bastion of good traditional country music. Other styles of good, original music flourish there and elsewhere. I obviously agree, all the great tunes have not yet been dreamed up, and probably never will be.

This was just a fun aside - I agree that an awful lot of people really do believe that the 'good original music' era is over. If it isn't that there isn't plenty of potential for good original tunes out there, what is the problem? That is sort of the point of this thread. What has happened systemically to put good music at the bottom of the heap for an awful lot of people? A lot has been already mentioned in this thread, always looking for new ideas about why, and what to do about it.

Quote: "I'm sure that if somebody could come up with a good tune by simply trying every possible combination of notes, rests, tempos, etc., then they'd have written a computer program to do it and they'd have come up with a bunch of good songs by now."

I'm definitely not arguing for the "monkeys and typewriters" approach to songwriting. I'm only arguing that there must be lots of good combinations there. It may be very hard to find them. When I was studying statistical physics, the fine physicist Charles Kittel, whose book we were using, made basically the same argument that I made, but with a different point. His argument was more or less as follows: put monkeys and typewriters in a room, the monkeys whack away for eternity. How long before the monkey comes up with any known piece of writing, much less Shakespeare. It's a very long time, in astronomical terms. But that does not invalidate the point that lots of 'undiscovered gems' are probably in there. IMO, it takes human 'intelligence' to write good literature or good songs. I've heard computer-generated music, and perhaps there's a reasonable way to instill enough 'musical intelligence' in a computer to write a good 'human-enjoyable' original song. But that's a far cry from monkeys and typewriters.

I would also not take the musical_notes-to-alphabet_letters analogy too far. In language, I believe the fundamental semantic unit is a word, not a letter. It's the combinations of words that impart meaning, in fact a wide variety of misspellings don't change the semantics. The number of possible valid word combinations is far smaller than the number of valid letter combinations. Have you ever tried any of the online "random lyric/poetry generators". I'm don't argue that they make good lyrics, but I would argue that they make as good lyrics as in a lot of so-called "music" these days.

On production cooperatives like Equity Records, I think it's a great idea. Dead Reckoning Records (http://www.deadreckoners.com) is another label using this approach, I believe. Some fine musicians like Kieran Kane, Kevin Welch, and Mike Henderson have made some great records this way. I have long argued with my musical associates for collaborative production. I don't know why, but it's tough to get people moving in the same direction on this. Perhaps it's an instinctive lack of trust. But, IMO, this is precisely what is needed. Neo-cons claim to argue for true capitalism, but I think this is the correct approach, not the ridiculous concentration of power going on in American industry now that they seem to really be after.

A lot of this comes down to economic philosophy, one based on a zero-sum-game (I win, you lose) mentality or one based on a cooperative (I win, you win) mentality. It's hard to make absolute generalities, but in most situations, better overall results are obtained when binding win-win agreements can be made. But if the rules can be breached, it is often better to operate using the zero-sum-game mentality. C'est la vie.

Edited for a small but confusing typo.

You're right -- it's the combinations of words that really matter more in every day life, not the combinations of letters.

So, I guess I could have made the analogy using words instead of letters. That is, for example, assume an average poem (or story, or whatever) is so many words long, so if you take the number of words available and raise that number to the power of the number of words you use -- your computer blows up!

I agree with you when you say, "The number of possible valid word combinations is far smaller than the number of valid letter combinations."

I also agree with you when you say, "IMO, it takes human 'intelligence' to write good literature or good songs."

The difference is that the number of notes available to write a melody is 12 or less, while the number of words available to write literature is somewhat greater.

My contention is that with music the same phenomenon applies -- that is, the number of combinations of notes that result in good music is far smaller than the number of possible combinations of musical notes.

Also, words are different than music. Music -- in and of itself -- has no specific conventional meaning attached to it (other than say military bugle calls and the like).

That is, you hear music and it's either pleasing or it's not be pleasing (or it brings some other kind of emotion). When you look at a word or a combination of words, the words themselves are neither pleasing or displeasing. Rather, it is the meaning associated with the words that affects us.

Anyway, my point has nothing to do with lyrics or words. What I was trying to get at(and I think we're on the same page here) is that whether you're talking about words, sentences, poems, or melodies, there are certain trends or rules or conventions, or whatever, that you have to follow in order to come up with something that is minimally acceptable and that has any meaning at all. Out of those minimally acceptable results, only a few of them will come across to a wide audience as "good" or "pleasing" or whatever it is that makes people enjoy whatever it is you're creating out of the letters, words, musical notes, etc.

Like you've said, if you give a monkey a typewriter, there's a chance that he could create a masterpiece of literature simply by chance. However, that chance is extremely small to say the least.

Likewise, as you've proven, the number of possible combinations of musical notes available is finite. Out of that finite number of possible combinations, there is a very very small number of combinations that would be considered to fall within the "minimal accepted standards" of music and which could be recognized as "music."

In turn, out of that very very small number of minimally acceptable combinations is a number of pleasing combinations that is probably orders of magnitude smaller yet.

I'm not arguing with your feeling that there must be good original tunes that haven't been written yet -- in fact I agree with it. I'm saying that I haven't heard very many lately and that the number appears (to me at least) to be falling.

[This message was edited by Tom Olson on 09 April 2005 at 03:52 PM.]

But, actually, I hear lots of good, new, original tunes, in many popular music formats - country, blues, jazz, rock, whatever. But I don't hear a lot in the mainstream commercial sector. That's what this thread is ultimately about - Can producers and musicians go outside that mainstream commercial system successfully? (whatever 'successfully' means). I hope that answer is eventually 'yes', and I think that distributing the production/distribution system will make this come to pass in time. Wishful thinking? Perhaps.