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hmm, i sound preachy and dorky. shouldn't try philosophy first thing in the morning, slapstick humor seems to be easier to pull off ;-) sorry if i appeared to jump on your case jimmy! i mean, what's the point of words at all, maaaan? just intonate, we'll get the drift! OOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!! although i do stand by the "silence is music too" remark. i think. well, you could look at it that way i guess ... ok, that's it, i think i better eat something ;-) mike -----Original Message----- From: Michael LaMeyer [mailto:m.lameyer@verizon.net] Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 6:29 AM To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com Subject: RE: live or memorex but this notion seems to me to be more of an aesthetic of musicianship rather than a definition of what "true" musicianship is universally. you're definition may be valid enough in your perspective and context, but i don't think we can ever come to a true universally applicable and accepted definition of music or musicianship, because the abstract tools (words) we're using to attempt this are inherently incapable of doing anything more than providing a rough, abstracted frame of reference. words are handy enough when you want to get a vague idea of what's on the menu, but they can't let you taste the food. there's an infinite diversity of perspective within any experience, the validity of any given perspective is only in relation to a particular context, and to get hung up on definitions such as those we're tossing around here is truely a very, very, slippery slope. IMHO, FWIW ... and besides, silence is music too ;-) mike -----Original Message----- From: Jimmy Fowler [mailto:jimfowler@prodigy.net] Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 8:36 PM To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com Subject: Re: live or memorex > But do musicians really create from silence or > just make something new from all the music > they've heard in their life, stored in the back > of their mind somewhere? I tend to go for the > latter. Nobody creates out of nothing, everybody > takes in some form of raw materials and organizes > them in a way they find to be ideal. Whether > it's notes and licks or samples and loops. certainly nobody is at a point of total and absolute freedom, but dj spooky (now just a totem) is getting a headstart on the game. what he uses is already organized to some degree...i mean, if he's cutting it up so much so that he's left with a single piano note or a single drum hit, then why not just play the piano and drum kit and sample your own playing? what dj spooky uses is already organized and placed on/within a piece of media (cd, lp, 8-track, etc.). i think every musician, particularly guitarists, have "licks" that they fall back on. the idea is to catch yourself when you're using stock ideas and say "you know, this is just an automatic lick that my fingers like to play. for that reason, i shall now discard it and try to come up with some arrangment of notes that i, personally, have never knowingly encountered." i think charlie parker told a story once: he had a fellow musician stand beside him as he practiced. parker's instructions were for his friend to hit him everytime they heard him recylce an idea. if he played a "lick", he got whacked. this is the idea, so far as i'm concerned. don't allow yourself to get away with anything less than 100% of your creativity. anything less is simply a cop-out...a sort of getting-by in the music. but no, to get back, no musician creates anything from total scratch. that having been said, where does your influence start and where does it stop? when you play a riff, how can you know for sure that it wasn't influenced or strikes your fancy because you heard something similar while walking down the street...maybe some cars were honking and the pitches just sounded right and your mind stored them but you didn't really pay that much attention. sorry, tangent... my point: sampling other folks music is just a little more effortless and therefore a little less legitimate (maybe legitimate isn't the right word). you didn't have to try quite as hard because you found a riff that you liked on a record somewhere, created by somebody else, already employed in somebody else's jam. i get the sneaking suspicion that i'm a one-man minority on this subject. -jim