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Feb. 5th, 2010 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sathorDeadmau5?
I have to admit I do like his stuff. But the thing is...
It's not very complicated, although it's a lot better than Basshunter (he makes me want to throw up as a musician.) It's kinda like Daft Punk, you know...I seriously can't listen to Around The World again after hearing it once.
I like the emotions he evokes but he's very repetitive. I understand that's the whole thing with dance music, but I think there can be a whole lot more ingenuity and structure going into it...it doesn't need to be just tweaking a knob here and there on a repeat beat and bass pattern that lasts the whole song and has a few breaks...rinse and repeat album after album...there's a reason there are live percussionists in successful bands...it's because they can modify what's going on with their instrument to fit the emotion of that moment in the song...a sequencer and producer can do the -same exact thing- but guess -what-...they are too lazy to do it. Repeating patterns for various parts of the song is fine in my mind...but Faxing Berlin by Deadmau5...nothing changes with regards to the percussion. For all 5 minutes or whatever.
So many guys have made their name like that, Tiesto and Armin Van Buuren to name a few, and there's these new fangled "industrial" artists that are even worse about it, running the same lame synth for four minutes straight...what I like about Deadmau5 is the production quality and the sound design...although there's no telling how much he didn't do himself...I could grab hundreds of gigs of sound samples if I had the HD space right now, but I simply don't.
But I am going to have to work on picking up as much good stuff as I can...because I'm beginning to feel like I've been working with low quality for far too long. The fact I can even impress people with what I have used in the past is absolutely mind blowing...but the truth is I've never really been able to impress myself.
But maybe I'm looking at it all the wrong way...for me, it's about making music good enough people want to listen to it at home...for an artist like Deadmau5 or these other "electronic" artists, maybe it's not so much about that, but about the live shows and making something people want to move too, something everybody is feeling...and maybe the complexity isn't all that important in that case.
There was this one song I heard by Deadmau5 today, at the end of it, there was a soundbyte from an "angry producer" about how "these electronic musicians are ruining the genre" and the thing is, I absolutely agree. But Deadmau5 was throwing a punch at the producers that feel that way. Truth is, that tells me he feels a little insecure about his work with regards to the greater scheme of things...I'm sure he knows there's small time and unknown underground artists that are a thousand times better than him...but i guess it breaks down to he got lucky and now he feels like he can throw punches at those guys, because they aren't making a living like he is.
Or maybe that little sound byte was him venting his own frustrations over artists like Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brother's, and all of the fucking pop and rap on the market today...all of it is heavily electronic, but it's not defined as such...and the electronic genre has never been able to get a real foothold on the market because of the way it is treated, even though so much of what is popular is electronic...
I have to admit I do like his stuff. But the thing is...
It's not very complicated, although it's a lot better than Basshunter (he makes me want to throw up as a musician.) It's kinda like Daft Punk, you know...I seriously can't listen to Around The World again after hearing it once.
I like the emotions he evokes but he's very repetitive. I understand that's the whole thing with dance music, but I think there can be a whole lot more ingenuity and structure going into it...it doesn't need to be just tweaking a knob here and there on a repeat beat and bass pattern that lasts the whole song and has a few breaks...rinse and repeat album after album...there's a reason there are live percussionists in successful bands...it's because they can modify what's going on with their instrument to fit the emotion of that moment in the song...a sequencer and producer can do the -same exact thing- but guess -what-...they are too lazy to do it. Repeating patterns for various parts of the song is fine in my mind...but Faxing Berlin by Deadmau5...nothing changes with regards to the percussion. For all 5 minutes or whatever.
So many guys have made their name like that, Tiesto and Armin Van Buuren to name a few, and there's these new fangled "industrial" artists that are even worse about it, running the same lame synth for four minutes straight...what I like about Deadmau5 is the production quality and the sound design...although there's no telling how much he didn't do himself...I could grab hundreds of gigs of sound samples if I had the HD space right now, but I simply don't.
But I am going to have to work on picking up as much good stuff as I can...because I'm beginning to feel like I've been working with low quality for far too long. The fact I can even impress people with what I have used in the past is absolutely mind blowing...but the truth is I've never really been able to impress myself.
But maybe I'm looking at it all the wrong way...for me, it's about making music good enough people want to listen to it at home...for an artist like Deadmau5 or these other "electronic" artists, maybe it's not so much about that, but about the live shows and making something people want to move too, something everybody is feeling...and maybe the complexity isn't all that important in that case.
There was this one song I heard by Deadmau5 today, at the end of it, there was a soundbyte from an "angry producer" about how "these electronic musicians are ruining the genre" and the thing is, I absolutely agree. But Deadmau5 was throwing a punch at the producers that feel that way. Truth is, that tells me he feels a little insecure about his work with regards to the greater scheme of things...I'm sure he knows there's small time and unknown underground artists that are a thousand times better than him...but i guess it breaks down to he got lucky and now he feels like he can throw punches at those guys, because they aren't making a living like he is.
Or maybe that little sound byte was him venting his own frustrations over artists like Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brother's, and all of the fucking pop and rap on the market today...all of it is heavily electronic, but it's not defined as such...and the electronic genre has never been able to get a real foothold on the market because of the way it is treated, even though so much of what is popular is electronic...
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-06 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-06 02:18 pm (UTC)The bass line was very expressive, and it had a really great emotional tone.
Some of his stuff I'm not too fond of, though. Some of the instrumentals feel very lacking in emotion. From what I've listened to so far, a lot of it is very slow to develop, which is a turn off for me because I produce electronic music, so repeat pattern build ups that last a minute or two are just incredibly annoying.
But he's very talented at sound design and I do as a whole like his stuff. I just imagine that there's probably a few songs off each album I'd really enjoy, and the rest is just kinda run of the mill stuff I wouldn't want to listen to very often. Maybe not necessarily run of the mill, but not inspiring enough for me to want to listen to often.
Of course this isn't saying much, because I basically hate everything I make too...bleh...