General
The Song Writting Process (a little bit of orginality and creativity please!)
I was just browsing a respected music production forum when I came across some tutorials that really made me do a double take. These were “song structure” tutorials. You know… stuff like “How to write a Hard Dance track“. Instruction was along the lines of : put a bass drum on every beat, a cymbal at the beginning of each phrase , bass line running on off beats, etc... that sort of thing. In a nutshell it gave the “formula”, that is to say the rule set, by which each style defines itself.
Now why did these tutorials make me do a double take? Basically I just could not believe that people were honestly trying to write music by constraining themselves to a particular style’s rule sets. I know corporate cock sucking whores like to use formulas to create junk pop in order to sell crap to the masses, but I did not think honest and supposedly creative musicians worked this way. A way, that I might add, is totally foreign to me. When I write, I don’t think “Ok.. Now I’m going to write a trance track” or “hey I might write a song using the 70’s hard rock formula”. I just open up to the muses, let the inspiration flow, and whatever comes… comes. Sometimes what comes is crap, sometimes it is not, and there is always refinement of what was inspired, but for the most part it is 100% inspiration. Music is art, and art is the creative expression of one’s Self (note the capital letter there!). Following a rule set is the antithesis of this. It stifles creativity, discourages innovation, penalises originality and gives birth to ubiquitous mediocrity.
The Great Firewall of Australia: Part one (Gotta protect da Childrenz kk!)
It seems Comrade Rudd and his over zealous communications minister Steve Conroy are keen to take us down the same path as those other bastions of freedom, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Closed tests of mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level have been completed and are now on the verge of being trialed on the nation at large. In short, the Australian government is about to censor every Australian's internet feed and there is no legal way we can opt out of it.
