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Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to aeolus)
Aeolus, think you're mistaking me for someone else. I study classical right now. I do have to side with z6 in not being interested in modern CG composers. The Tango en Skai dude would be the flamenco gateway drug to CG.
And Tannenbaum's Sor is about as lame as it gets! Although of course, I carefully read his book when I was going through the Sor 20.
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to guitarbuddha)
GB, good call. John Mills plays beautifully. This is simple but gorgeous:
About Segovia, I have to admit to not liking him on CD much (although z6's silly slurs go way too far). But I happened to listen to an LP of his the other day. The sound was absolutely gorgeous. Perhaps Doug Niedt was right when he said Segovia's sound as heard on CDs doesn't really come though. He claimed Parkening's recorded sound is as close to what Segovia really sounded though as it gets.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
quote:
But I happened to listen to an LP of his the other day. The sound was absolutely gorgeous.
The LP was analogue while the CDs are digital that chop the sound up into bites. They sound a lot better now that when they first came out. I have a CD by Dire Straits that is really horrible and I have their Love over Gold LP that is really fine. No question the sound on LPs is superior. Parkening used a Ramirez and he produced a similar sound as he has written at master classes he would meet in Segovia's hotel room for private instruction so no doubt Segovia was giving him the inside dope on the way he produced his sound.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
quote:
(although z6's silly slurs go way too far)
My slurs are better than Segovia's but not as good as Paco's. You're getting a little carried away with the slurs yourself. Cool it or I won't be hiring you if I ever have the need for flamenco, at a wedding in Arizona. (So you're really set on quite a sliver of a niche there.) What does Segovia care? He's not still alive is he? Will he sue me for not claiming he was a virtuoso? He was a very fine guitarist and a world-class marketing man. He seems now to be the head of some kind church.
Aoleus, you should tell that composer to sack his marketing department. The description of the plumbing only got entertaining when he said boing, instead of E flat.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
Thats a lovely piece, but I'd much prefer to hear it on a steel string in an Irish Pub than sitting uncomfortably in a concert hall listening to a guy in a tuxedo . I'm not trying to be provocative , but I honestly think the formality of the classical world is a turn off for a lot of people.
Posts: 3446
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to aeolus)
quote:
ORIGINAL: aeolus The LP was analogue while the CDs are digital that chop the sound up into bites. They sound a lot better now that when they first came out. I have a CD by Dire Straits that is really horrible and I have their Love over Gold LP that is really fine. No question the sound on LPs is superior.
This is OT, but you have struck one of my pet peeves. Nyquist's sampling theorem proves that a band-limited signal can be reconstructed absolutely perfectly from samples taken at twice the highest frequency. Human hearing is band-limited to about 20 Hz- 20 KHz.
The CD specification sets the sampling frequency at 44.1 KHz, which is more than that required by Nyquist.
Early CD players sounded bad, due to a faulty method of recovering the digital clock. Once this was understood, good sounding CD players came on the market.
Some early CDs were good, some not so good. The present quality of good digital recording far exceeds that of the best LPs. I have a five-foot shelf of LPs that I play regularly on a high end rig, and about 1,700 CDs.
Some people like the sound of LPs better than CDs. So be it. "Chopping up the sound into bites" has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this. With both media, the devil is in the details.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan
quote:
ORIGINAL: aeolus The LP was analogue while the CDs are digital that chop the sound up into bites. They sound a lot better now that when they first came out. I have a CD by Dire Straits that is really horrible and I have their Love over Gold LP that is really fine. No question the sound on LPs is superior.
This is OT, but you have struck one of my pet peeves. Nyquist's sampling theorem proves that a band-limited signal can be reconstructed absolutely perfectly from samples taken at twice the highest frequency. Human hearing is band-limited to about 20 Hz- 20 KHz.
The CD specification sets the sampling frequency at 44.1 KHz, which is more than that required by Nyquist.
Early CD players sounded bad, due to a faulty method of recovering the digital clock. Once this was understood, good sounding CD players came on the market.
Some early CDs were good, some not so good. The present quality of good digital recording far exceeds that of the best LPs. I have a five-foot shelf of LPs that I play regularly on a high end rig, and about 1,700 CDs.
Some people like the sound of LPs better than CDs. So be it. "Chopping up the sound into bites" has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this. With both media, the devil is in the details.
RNJ
I hate to derail the thread but I have to agree with Richard. I'm tired of the whole digital vs. analog debate. They both have their strengths, they can both sound good, they can both sound bad, it's all about what you prefer.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
quote:
The present quality of good digital recording far exceeds that of the best LPs
By what measure? In the old days of High Fidelity Magazine they had an engineer who tested equipment scientifically and he would conclude his assessment by saying from the reading he got on his equipment the unit should sound good or words to that effect. How do you judge quality in music reproduction?
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
Richard, I don't know about the fidelity question, but I sure would hold off of saying these studies prove the issue definitively. What is clear, for me, is that there is something about the LP system that somehow makes it sound more alive, richer, fuller, pleasurable and "realistic" than CDs--hisses, pops, bumps, and all. And somehow Segovia sounded better on an old Goodwill LP than on the ten-odd or so albums of his I have on CD. Maybe the solution is a $2000 CD player.
Posts: 3467
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
quote:
I don't know about the fidelity question, but I sure would hold off of saying these studies prove the issue definitively. What is clear, for me, is that there is something about the LP system that somehow makes it sound more alive, richer, fuller, pleasurable and "realistic" than CD
I completely agree, Miguel. I have vinyl LPs dating back 50 years, of flamenco, folk music, classical music, you name it, and I prefer listening to them than the same works on CDs. They do sound richer and fuller to me as well. I realize that much of this is personal preference, but if I were forced at gunpoint to dispose of either my vinyl LPs or my CDs, the CDs would go.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
I also agree with Miguel.
There is something wrong with Nyquist's theorem. It doesn't work, in terms of listening.
But I expect that's maybe equivalent to disagreeing about Segovia, even though it has actual numbers. Digital is so handy though.
And I promise not to talk pedagogy anymore. Nobody is interested. Just you, and mostly in a bad mood. I do not know what is wrong with the theorem though, but I expect them to find something out about human perception that explains why it doesn't sound as good as it should at the rates where it should be 'equivalent' to us as listeners.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
I lied.
This Nyquist thing is interesting and can shed light on something important in the classical technique versus flamenco technique debate (given that it is a non-issue, aggravating, and childish, or maybe that's just me.).
I f I use the theorem to sample classical guitar tones. For example, say we made a list of the techniques Grisha cites. Then we built a virtual guitar (sound bank - not a 'mathematical model' - the gesture would already be imprinted in the sample) from individual samples. I know I could build classical performaces that would 'fool' anyone here into thinking that it was 'real'.
Bubalub, if you're still here. This is the 'investigating reality' part: I could not build a flamenco peformance of even the 'simplest' single chord, one-finger playing using the same database without enormous difficulty.
To capture the flamenco gesture I would have to sample at a much 'higher' level (musical, not in terms of actual sample rate; I would use much higher rates than Nyquist). At the actual level of the labeled technique, in fact. For example, I'd need to sample whole 'musical' phrases at the most granular level. In flamenco, one ends up sampling like a bleedn' DJ, stealing great lumps of music. But single tones, maybe tirando, and apoyando, but tirando would suffice, for Bach. (Apoyando would have guitar listeners asking how the guitarist played apoyando when it was physically impossibe, for example, to play a given phrase.) A library of tirando-only would do for the whole of rennaissance and up to maybe classical, maybe all of it, I don't know.
Bach, for example. Say I get Grisha to sit for five hundred hours while I make libraries of him playing individual notes across a range of velocities (I would need to artificially normalize but we could still have multiple velocity levels for each note.)
Then Grisha could sit and we could program performaces according to his personal interpretation, but digitally.
But one simply cannot do that with flamenco. The gestures are too important. Too 'physically' subtle.
The only approach that could work, at a granular level, would be to model the instrument, rather than the sound, then develop digital gestures (do-able these days?) to emulate or play flamenco.
I believe this is important. It is a real, demonstratable, measurable 'thing'. It is not just opinion or taste. It separates all that stuff from something physical that underlies the gestures that are required.
That is to say; the 'dirt' the jangling noisy stings. They're not just noise. They are fundamentally more complex, at the level where humans might infer music. All of the little sounds and ticks we hear. For example, the lazy i finger I hear in the triplets after the alzapua in Almoraima. To play that one 'only' has to relax, in exactly the right way. Multiply this across all phrases played in flamenco and while the complexity exists fundamentally within each individual note, it is not accessible by defining 'the note' as the fundamental particle of music.
There really is a huge difference. We could sample Grisha. Grisha could 'orchestrate' the playing of Bach in such a way us to make it indistinguishable from that which he might play if, for example, he wanted a 'straight-up' zap through performance of Bach.
Indeed, we would have to program slight fluffs. (Sorry Grisha, in real life you can be perfect but if we digitize you nobody would believe it without 'clues' and red herrings. A sniff here and there in the background. Eazy peezy.)
But flamenco is different. Single notes do not cut it and they are so enmeshed inside other techniques that one cannot use them to create a digital right hand as easily.
It's like this. Jackson Pollock used to claim that every single drip on the canvas was deliberate, planned, created.
Of course, he lied. But flamenco guitar is like Jackson Pollock telling the truth. It is real, fundamental complexity. It is not made up.
I hope this is not offensive. And I get that one might theorize that I am missing some important point or completely on the wrong track and 'justifying this or that.
Segovia was right about these 'styles' being polar opposites, but for all the wrong reasons. He thought it was because he was so evolved and they were bunch of illiterate, greasy nacos.
But they taught him. He took it. He did well for himself. Good for him.
But I can tell the difference between margarine and butter. The state of virtuosity requires the listener to wonder at how easy the musician makes it sound. Doesn't matter what the music is or how bad or good it is. It is the 'ease' that decides.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
I'm not suggesting that one is 'better' than the other. Please don't harangue me with videos of gnarled faces and the like. I get it.
Grisha, your contribution was most welcome. I have pre-ordered your recording of the Goldberg variations. But the folks at Amazon gave me a funny look when I ordered.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
Richard
Aren't you confusing two different things? The sampling frequency is the rate at which sound is sampled, and the more frequent the better; but it's the depth of the sample in bits, that is important in terms of sound information, pitch, brilliance etc, and CD samples have been restricted to 16 bits since the beginning. We might work with 24, 48, 96 bit samples on our computers but it doesn't make it as far as the CD.
Posts: 15242
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Grisha)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Grisha
The main difference between flamenco and classical guitar is in the mindset. Classical guitarists have to monitor EVERY note they play in every melodic line and every chord, whereas flamenco guitarists mainly deal with general contours and dynamics. The biggest challenge in classical guitar is to monitor all the lines in polyphonic music and assign individual tonal colors, dynamics and, most importantly, articulations to every voice, so that the audience hears clear independent lines, as if an ensemble was playing. That level of control requires a different mindset than that appropriate to flamenco. This is not to say, of course, that flamenco guitarists are not aware of a great multitude of nuances in their plating, it's just that they do not think about every note.
On a side note, I also suspect that classical guitarists' historical lack of scale speed is due to this very mindset, which prevents them from disconnecting the mind from every note and letting the fingers fly.
I find this not to be the case when you look to individuals, or rather, you are generalizing and that detail is personal. You will find classical players that are just playing the notes on the page, not bringing out voices etc, and flamenco players that really care about the flamenco sound for each note, fast or slow. And in some cases the fact the rhythm is adhered to strictly vs a player playing more freely yet focused on tone or voice separation are two different ways the player can "monitor EVERY note they play".... clearly there is a general concept that the flamenco player will have less freedom to take liberty with compas than a classical player interpreting a piece "as written". It is rare to hear classical players focused on "groove" elements of music, though in some cases I have heard that done and often times the player is also the composer.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Grisha)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Grisha
there are no absolute truths
This sentence is self-contradictory as it claims itself to be true. There is also no "relative" truth, hence the attribute "absolute" doesnt make any sense. There are true and false generalizations of course. A generalization over an entity of elements remains true, even if you find one or few elements of an entity that doesn't match the generalization. I thought this was common knowledge.
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to z6)
z6, that's a rather elaborate thought-experiment when you can just say you prefer flamenco. Again, it's half-baked unless you're referring to robotic Baroque interpretations that were in vogue during much of the last century. A quick survey of "the lit'rature", such as Donnington, will show that this was always misguided. Flowing, organic, and emotional dynamics and other events occured in Baroque music and were written about by many of the major pedagogues. Nor does your point, which would suggest that flamencos must memorize entire phrases (gestures), support your earlier contention that flamenco guitar "exists" because it is easy enough that mortals can speak it. But musical gesture, or phrasing, is just as important in CG as in any other music! Listen to Bream and a Midi file side by side if there is doubt in your mind. Even John Williams shapes the music, although you might not believe it at first listen. I won't argue that including unmusical sounds and buzzes (noise) would add to the processor's task if we were trying to create a flamencomputer.
***notice this post does not include adolescent attacks on your profession or irrelevant slurs against dead people.
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Bliblablub)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Bliblablub
quote:
ORIGINAL: Grisha
there are no absolute truths
This sentence is self-contradictory as it claims itself to be true. There is also no "relative" truth, hence the attribute "absolute" doesnt make any sense. There are true and false generalizations of course. A generalization over an entity of elements remains true, even if you find one or few elements of an entity that doesn't match the generalization. I thought this was common knowledge.
Good post! I agree, communication on this board should be held to the standard of a philosophy thesis. Shape up before posting here, guitar virtuosos!
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to z6)
quote:
ORIGINAL: z6
I lied.
This Nyquist thing is interesting and can shed light on something important in the classical technique versus flamenco technique debate (given that it is a non-issue, aggravating, and childish, or maybe that's just me.).
I f I use the theorem to sample classical guitar tones. For example, say we made a list of the techniques Grisha cites. Then we built a virtual guitar (sound bank - not a 'mathematical model' - the gesture would already be imprinted in the sample) from individual samples. I know I could build classical performaces that would 'fool' anyone here into thinking that it was 'real'.
Bubalub, if you're still here. This is the 'investigating reality' part: I could not build a flamenco peformance of even the 'simplest' single chord, one-finger playing using the same database without enormous difficulty.
To capture the flamenco gesture I would have to sample at a much 'higher' level (musical, not in terms of actual sample rate; I would use much higher rates than Nyquist). At the actual level of the labeled technique, in fact. For example, I'd need to sample whole 'musical' phrases at the most granular level. In flamenco, one ends up sampling like a bleedn' DJ, stealing great lumps of music. But single tones, maybe tirando, and apoyando, but tirando would suffice, for Bach. (Apoyando would have guitar listeners asking how the guitarist played apoyando when it was physically impossibe, for example, to play a given phrase.) A library of tirando-only would do for the whole of rennaissance and up to maybe classical, maybe all of it, I don't know.
Bach, for example. Say I get Grisha to sit for five hundred hours while I make libraries of him playing individual notes across a range of velocities (I would need to artificially normalize but we could still have multiple velocity levels for each note.)
Then Grisha could sit and we could program performaces according to his personal interpretation, but digitally.
But one simply cannot do that with flamenco. The gestures are too important. Too 'physically' subtle.
The only approach that could work, at a granular level, would be to model the instrument, rather than the sound, then develop digital gestures (do-able these days?) to emulate or play flamenco.
I believe this is important. It is a real, demonstratable, measurable 'thing'. It is not just opinion or taste. It separates all that stuff from something physical that underlies the gestures that are required.
That is to say; the 'dirt' the jangling noisy stings. They're not just noise. They are fundamentally more complex, at the level where humans might infer music. All of the little sounds and ticks we hear. For example, the lazy i finger I hear in the triplets after the alzapua in Almoraima. To play that one 'only' has to relax, in exactly the right way. Multiply this across all phrases played in flamenco and while the complexity exists fundamentally within each individual note, it is not accessible by defining 'the note' as the fundamental particle of music.
There really is a huge difference. We could sample Grisha. Grisha could 'orchestrate' the playing of Bach in such a way us to make it indistinguishable from that which he might play if, for example, he wanted a 'straight-up' zap through performance of Bach.
Indeed, we would have to program slight fluffs. (Sorry Grisha, in real life you can be perfect but if we digitize you nobody would believe it without 'clues' and red herrings. A sniff here and there in the background. Eazy peezy.)
But flamenco is different. Single notes do not cut it and they are so enmeshed inside other techniques that one cannot use them to create a digital right hand as easily.
It's like this. Jackson Pollock used to claim that every single drip on the canvas was deliberate, planned, created.
Of course, he lied. But flamenco guitar is like Jackson Pollock telling the truth. It is real, fundamental complexity. It is not made up.
I hope this is not offensive. And I get that one might theorize that I am missing some important point or completely on the wrong track and 'justifying this or that.
Segovia was right about these 'styles' being polar opposites, but for all the wrong reasons. He thought it was because he was so evolved and they were bunch of illiterate, greasy nacos.
But they taught him. He took it. He did well for himself. Good for him.
But I can tell the difference between margarine and butter. The state of virtuosity requires the listener to wonder at how easy the musician makes it sound. Doesn't matter what the music is or how bad or good it is. It is the 'ease' that decides.
Music is full of paradoxes.
I think you are making out the Nyquist sampling theorem to be something it's not. It quite simply states that if we want to accurately sample a waveform (eg sound wave) then we must find out the highest frequency in the signal and then sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency. This makes sense if you think about trying to draw a wave through two sampling points - one point at the peak the other at the trough will define that frequency exactly. Recording the correct amplitudes is another problem.
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Bliblablub)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Bliblablub
quote:
ORIGINAL: Grisha
there are no absolute truths
1.This sentence is self-contradictory as it claims itself to be true.
2.There is also no "relative" truth, hence the attribute "absolute" doesnt make any sense.
3.There are true and false generalizations of course.
4. A generalization over an entity of elements remains true, even if you find one or few elements of an entity that doesn't match the generalization. I thought this was common knowledge.
1. The intent is Grisha's and does not belong to the sentence.
2. Vapid.
3. No there aren't. Generalisations are useful or not depending on the interpreter and the situation.
4. You have two problems here. Firstly a lack of skill in English. Secondly the general drift of your post seems to suggest that English is not appropriate for all observations. I would tend to agree with you which is why I am disappointed that your clumsy attempt to explain boolean algebra was not accompanied by a diagram, as is normally the case.
I trust that your thirst for clarity will be gratified by this post.
If not I am sure will have sympathy for any irritating inconsistencies in its construction or indeed any bloody mindedness present during it's composition .
Posts: 15242
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
My response to grisha was not real clear I think. I know there are not going to be "absolute truths". I was concerned with how we generalize. I don't see it like classical=note detail focus, flamenco=contour/phrase focus. IMO it's unfair to generalize like that. However it's ok to generalize that they both focus on those things in different ways.
Classical note focus=tone and voicing dynamics. Flamenco note focus=timing and Tone (flamenco sound), so in reverse order. Classical phrasing contour=musical development of the direction of the piece, flamenco contour or phrasing=compas (remate) and improvisation or arranging on the fly so it leads to stops and starts dramatically. Solo, or accompaniment wise.
Both classical and flamenco players should also associate speed with timing, NOT with technique or musical approach. Statements such as "flamencos use extensors so they naturally develop speedy scales", are BS. A better theory would be the flamenco player, imitating the voice of the singer, necessarily develops speedy phrases that mimic or answer the cante. Some singers are "faster" than others too you know.
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