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Listening to The Smiths tonight.. and feeling like I know NOTHING about making music
My old favorite, The Smiths.. totally killed any confidence I had in my hack music. I haven’t listened to them in awhile. Such complexity I never truly picked up on before trying to make music myself. It’s ridiculous how much is going on at any one time and they still make it sound great. All hail Marr and Morrissey.
Comments
I always thought the rhythm section of the Smiths added a lot of texture and pop to their sound. Just sayin...
“The closer you get to godhead the more you feel like a useless piece of dog dirt.”
Stimpy, Ren and Stimpy show.
When that feeling passes, that’s when you should worry.
I was listening to The Smiths the other day as well. Have always loved Marr’s highlife influenced guitar lines. Their music is immortalized regardless of Morrissey’s present day hate politics. What an absolute idiot though...
The Smiths, wonderful music and timeless...
Johnny Marr is a god. The Smiths & then the Stone Roses is for me the epitome of that crafty british style of texture/rhythm guitar.
to quote canister..
"my shit is always better than someone else's genius"
apart from when it comes to grammar
so..
You shut your mouth
How can you say
I play the guitar the wrong way? lol
I know a lot of people love them, but I never got them. Hugely overrated in my view. Just saying there are different points of view, not wanting to start a war.
Tastes aside, I think everyone here can relate to the spirit of the OP.
We all do it, but comparing yourself to others (or even worse, a group of others) isn't good for you.
Keep practicing and make your music.
Absolutely. Rhythm plays a huge role.
Ha! Awesome quote!
Would love for them set aside their differences and do a reunion tour.. but that will most likely never happen.
Yes, still relevant today.. thoroughly enjoyed revisiting about 5 of their albums last night.
LOL
No worries. It’s not for everyone. Try ‘The Queen is Dead’ album though.. or ‘Rank’.. can’t deny it’s just great work musically.
Yeah, I get it. I wasn’t saying I was trying to be like them. But listening made me realize how elementary my approach has been in comparison. I’ve only just started trying to make music in the last few years. So, definitely a lot more practice is needed. I have the tools, now I just need the skill. LOL
@_mwallace Listen to the kindergarden rhymes on today pop music. That should cheer you up.
From the song you posted the other day you seem to have a pretty good basis. Keep writing, keep practicing. Nobody’s first song was a masterwork.
Try dissecting their music and see the structure of it. It’ll give you ideas. I like to recreate songs in my DAW to see all the individual parts and how they work. I usually do it with jazz or classical but I’ll do some rock stuff and funk a lot too. Just find a midi file and open it up and study it
Thanks guys. I appreciate the advice.
growing up in the uk while it was all going off, girls swooning all over the next big thing, they were the bane of my musical existence with all that gladioli tossing on TOTP 😂🤣😂
That said, the guitar lines in ‘How Soon Is Now’ are most excellent
was a sometime fan of TSR’s at the time, particularly the opening & closing tracks on their debut. there was a dj in the Brighton Basement club who would rinse repeat the instro outro of ‘I Am The Resurrection’ for about 40 minutes at the close of every Friday night circa ‘89, with the lighting rig & smoke machines turned up to 11. subsequently came to feel that the epitome of ‘that sound’ had occurred some decades previous in the 1960’s, mostly via groups hardly anyone had heard of
The Smiths and also Morrissey solo are what I listen to when I listen to music usually. It’s a crutch but it makes me happy. I was a little kid in the 80’s but fortunately a friend in my small town introduced me to them in the early 90s when Nirvana and grunge had started to blow up but we were trying to do bands like Black Flag and the Descendents. The Smiths were all great of course and at their time an insanely original sound but Johnny Marr really is so amazing with chord voicing, using many multiple guitar parts and studio production tricks, his picking is just ridiculous and I would kill to come up with arpeggios as cool as his. I believe the song Suffer Little Children was maybe the first idea Johnny brought to work on with Morrissey. It never got me back then but it’s such a good song with Morrissey’s tongue in cheek, but super dark subject matter about The Moors Murders in Manchester. Listen to the guitar on that song it’s so amazing and was one of their first- written as a teenager by Marr 😳
OP- throw in major 7th and minor 7th chords a lot! Marr wrote a lot of the bass lines too. Let me know when you figure out how to come up with those please
..and keep going!
Does anyone know or can point to somewhere that has how Marr made the guitar sounds on HSIN? I think I read somewhere that the band didn't like the song after it got big because it wasn't representative of their sound, but that's the song that I started listening to them with. It's funny how a lot of bands have a song like that.
Ah I love the Smiths.. I was hooked when I heard 'girlfriend in a coma' on the radio when I was a teenager in the late 80's.. After listening to their music for years I finally saw Morrissey live in '99 when he gave a concert in The Netherlands...
I like this performance by Marr a lot:
https://www.westword.com/music/johnny-marr-on-how-he-created-the-sound-for-how-soon-is-now-without-effects-pedals-5704969
“Q:That rippling effect, layered effect and maybe tremolo effect you had on "How Soon Is Now" -- did you do that with multiple amps when you recorded it?
A:Yeah. The tremolo sound from the intro? That was four Fender Twin Reverbs. Myself controlling the speed of two of them and the producer controlling the speed of the other two. So two amps were recorded on one side of the stereo and the other two on the other side. I recorded the part on the tape without the tremolo, and then I sent the part from tape out to four amps, and he controlled two, and I controlled the other two.
And it took a long time because inevitably the tremolo would go out of time with the track because the tremolo doesn't stay in regular clock time. Also we would go out with each other's amps, so we had to keep looking up at each other after every fifteen second bursts and kind of fess up, "Oh yeah, mine kind of went out of time." It took long time, but I'm glad we did it that way because if we had cut and pasted two seconds of audio, it wouldn't have had the same dynamic quality throughout the six minutes of the song, or however long it is.”
Oh my, so it was just as complex to create as it sounds. Thanks for the link @maxwellhouser! I should have looked before posting earlier, but there is quite a lengthy Wikipedia article on this song with some details on the other elements in it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Soon_Is_Now?
The article mentions that the song was considered a "major problem" to play live. Sounds like it was hard enough to do in the studio!
W.erd.
Sage advice! I learnt a bunch about music theory simply by playing in cover bands and transcribing my parts. Something that sounds complex usually has a theoretical basis which can be easily understood. This should build confidence rather destroy it.
God Save The Queen (77) through to The Queen Is Dead (86) seemed like bookends of a particular kind of English decade (for me in London anyway)...
You can tell the way the songs are constructed are by the band jamming on a chord sequence, and the morrisey comes along and puts his major 3rd to root (sometimes 4th to major 3rd and then to root) melody on everything. Sometimes this pattern is reversed (root to 3rd - there is a light...)
Exceptions are how soon is now and maybe a few others.
Related to the OP feeling...
It reminds me a guy who was doing glitch/dnb/jungle music with Ableton mimicking things to sound like Auterche and similar groups but drawing them at pianoroll and automation. The boy is a genius because he achieve it but that kind of music usually is done by algorithmic composition in programming environments like maxmsp/pd to focus on other areas of expression by the variables you design...
but hey! There is also Jojo Mayer and the nerv!!
so IMHO is not how to much know than how to much can apply to reach your goal. We must have high standards but alongside its context and particular goals.
Don't be so hard on yourself but keep practicing focused on your goal. Take some time to wonder new approaches and check your own standards. There's near infinite ways to make music (and infinite to make noise) so ask yourself the right questions to figuring by yourself your inner motivations. It could mean an entire life but practice (and meditation) could speed up that process to make it just 99% of your that time...
Jojo Mayer in my top three favorite drummers of all time. Nerve is great
so much sound with such few people
Yep ! Top drummer !!!
I definitely empathise. I also have all the tools, have a basic ability to put together a track, but...
I get the same feeling as the OP but in regards to lyric writing. Classic musicians like Jim Croce, David Bowie, Prince, Kurt Cobain, etc, and (for a more modern example) Sia all humble me as a wannabe lyricist.
I can create melodies, chord progs, backing tracks just fine. However, lyrics often stump me. Last thing I want to do is fall into the trap of "kindergarten" lyrics as @ecou so succinctly put it, lol.
Thanks for write properly the name, I wrote it from pronunciation in spanish without think
Succinctly 🤔🤔 I had to google that one 😂😂 Turns out its the exact same in French. I guess I’m a bit embarrassed now. 😳😳