What’s making these horrendous screechings slightly more pleasant to my third favorite  headhole? I’ll tell you. It’s globalization. These artists are not just American pop stars like in the good old days of boy bands and sugary one hit wonders like (insert fanboy fave from the ’80s). Music isn’t being ported to other cultural platforms like some kind of second rate, slap draggle anime dub, it’s been strategically formulated to address mass audiences across language, geography, taste level and ethnic background. Thanks to the greedy fatcats at the mega-labels, (you know who you are and who you’ve destroyed) there’s something in each album for everyone. One country-esque ballad, one hip hop head bobber, one repetitive euro pop trance dance dj feeder, and one fan favorite focused brand builder. I don’t like the formula any more than you do, but, it works. Let’s face it, in the iTunes age, all the labels need is for each music lover in the world to buy one single off each album, and it will add up to a pretty diversified roster/stable of youguns for them to exploit/invest in.

Is the music made all the better because of it? Some of it, yes. There’s always some diamond in the rough or disaster gone right that turns up when you mix good music from all over the world together. And that’s where I’m seeing an uptick in the quality of bad music in America. Young artists are actually learning from and being influenced by music that 20 years ago, they would have never been able to access. It’s sparking something in them, and helping them to get better. (ever so slowly)

Who knows? Maybe, a few years from now our pop stars will deserve the money, praise and attention we lavish them with? Naaaaah. It takes a long time for a few scattered audio acorns to sprout and grow into  something solid

You see, I have this thing about music with lyrics that are obscured, unintelligible, nonsensical or vulgar. I think it has something to do with my love of words and the fact that I can’t read music very well at all. Because it takes me a lot of time to pull apart the various layers of music and truly appreciate the elements and how they work together, I tend to focus on lyrics and melody right away. This is why I can have a hard time with rap. Sometimes. I just can’t catch the words quick enough. So, all of this has me thinking. If I’m predisposed to hearing certain parts of music first, or even seeking certain musical structures first, other people must do the same. (Duh!)

Perhaps this is what drives our personal preferences regarding music entirely. If I could play an instrument, read music well, and didn’t have years of choral training under my belt, what would my music tastes look like? My friends always tease me for being such a rabid Brandy fan. Her harmonies, smooth, low tones and sappy subject matter lull me into a comfortable state of mind that I try and visit frequently. I know that I’m missing out on a lot of different music styles by feeding my preferences when I consume music, but I can’t help it. Maybe none of us can.

The only way that I can enjoy music outside of my comfort zone is by forcing myself to find the ways in which my learned preferences and listening abilities meet and overlap with unknown territory. Before long, my right foot is tapping my comforter to the beat of Mr. Shady’s still garbled tirade. With time and an interpreter, I can even see myself being teased for listening to Mr. Mathers on purpose. But not tonight.

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After a quick search on the all knowing, all seeing, and altogether (if not newly) ubiquitous Wikipedia, I’ve found what I think to be fairly good evidence to start tapering off our consumption of big label music in favor of cheaper, smarter auditory satisfaction. Traditional record labels basically do three things. They make and distribute albums. (LPs at first and now CDs) They conduct A&R (Artists and Repertoire, which is basically scouting for talent and mediating between the artist and the label), and finally, they enforce copyrights and contracts (or sue people). These things are all fine and good when you have a finite number of artists, controlled access to decent recording/ mixing  equipment and one or two mediums on which the music can be stored and sold. But as we all know, that is no longer the case.

Technological advances have allowed people to create full and completely professional albums in their garage, upload it onto the internet for people to purchase or share, all while promoting themselves through viral videos, weblogs and podcasts. Sure, there are lots of little bits of business that get lost, like, bribing radio stations to play certain artists ad-nauseum, or big buck media blitzes that put songs in commercials and tv shows so frequently that people forget where they actually came from.

I think I can live without that. I think that the time has come for the netlabel. The branding and marketing element that record labels bring into the music trade are no longer helpful, consumer centered, or even lucrative. Do we have to listen to ‘brand name music’ to get the required enjoyment from our universes’ most potent pleasure? Copyright laws and the web will eventually make peace with one another and buying music online will be as easy as…iTunes! Do we really want one of our most precious art forms to be controlled by glorified law firms? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great deal that labels can do to distill and develop artist potential, but they’ll always use capitalist reasoning to choose which artists they invest in. I think it’s time that consumers took over this responsibility. We can handle it. We’re already doing it now, here on rifflet.com

How is this possible you say? I’ll tell you. In my understanding of sampling music as it exists today, there are those that sample thoughtfully, taking an artistic statement and elaborating on it and adding to it, and there are those who merely wish to re-package an idea for commercial sale. Hip-hop, neo-soul, alternative, pop, trance, house, etc, and so on; they all make use of sampling to great effect.

In the earlier days of hip-hop, it was the repurposing and repositioning of old vinyl records as rhythmic elements instead of melodic ones that helped to make the genre stand out and give voice to a global sentiment. Trance and house music showed audiences that one song could be reconfigured in countless ways to produce even more numerous responses. When an artist offers up his or her work for critique through performance, they are, in a sense, submitting material to the universal bank of human thought. Yeah. It’s that deep. Once something leaves your mind, it can never be completely yours again. Sorry. In fact, your ideas are more than likely offshoots and running sprouts of the thoughts of others that have inspired you. I’m not saying that no one can ever own anything they create, I’m just saying that works morph and merge and grow in a natural progression that sampling can help facilitate.

So, having said all that, I want to  encourage the Rifflet community to practice thoughtful sampling whenever possible. Download available riffs and converse with the universal human thought bank. There is so much pleasure and fullfillment that can be received from watching what your thought becomes in someone else’s mind. Your contribution to the Rifflet community is more than just  your riffs. You can also process musical ideas and improve upon your peers’ works with the hope that they will do the same for you. So, get to it!

This is exactly the idea (or one of the ideas) we had in mind when creating this site.  Take disperate musical elements. Mix/Edit/Loop.  Repeat.

It’s easy to get started.  Do a YouTube search for “Music Lessons” or “Guitar Playing“ or anything with sound, for that matter.  The following free software may be of some help:

• Better YouTube Firefox Extension – A great way to rip .flv (Flash video) files from YouTube
• SUPER – Convert .flv files into a format your video editor can digest. Here’s a great SUPER tutorial
• Audacity – The go-to open-source audio editor

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a great open-source video editor right now.  (Feel free to comment me wrong.)  That being said, there are some good demos and other ways of securing a video editing app. These two are PC only, but if you’re on a Mac you already have iMovie, or ideally Final Cut Pro, which is probably the best software ever made in the history of the universe.

• Adobe Premiere – My absolute favorite; requires a free Adobe account
• Sony Vegas Pro – Never used it, but some people swear by the Vegas line

There are also lots of gray-market, below-the-table options for acquiring the above software if you’re in a pinch.  Think schmit schmorrent.

Sorry software developers.  To make up for it, here’s an article on the ethics of reusing material online.

Image courtesy beatnikside

My name is Nate, and I’m a 27 year old writer from North Carolina.  Out of the kindness of their hearts, the administrators at rifflet.com have offered to let me post to this blog once in a while, just to get conversations started.  So, here goes nothing, I hope you like it.

Just like many of you, I’m a member of Rifflet (riffler?… anyone?…no?…ok) and love to tinker with making music in my spare time.  Here in Brooklyn, New York, where I live, I find music and music culture fascinating and important to daily life.  I look around at all the people who are literally plugged into an mp3 player for most of the day and think, what are they listening to?  Our new lives as musical cyborgs is old news and commonplace these days, what I’m more interested in is what people are thinking about music.  How do they choose it?  Does listening create a mood or space that helps them get through the day?  I want access to all that internal stuff that we only share with the shower curtain and maybe a drunk best friend or two at a Korean karaoke spot.  My guess is that you other Rifflers (I’m just going to run with it) are thinking the same thing, if not… that’s cool too.

So.  The other day, some colleagues and I were sitting around waiting for a meeting to start and someone mentioned the oscars and “Jai Ho” winning best song.  We happened to have an Indian employee who spoke Hindi on hand, so she was politely asked to translate it for us.  She told us that the song’s chorus emphatic chorus line Jai Ho, didn’t really have an English translation besides something like, give light or be light or something like that.  It hit me then that even though myself and several other people around the world, really liked the song and truly had no idea what the lyrics meant at all.  I mean how many songs do we all have in our music library that are sung in different languages?  I have a few Eartha Kitt numbers myself that I know word for word, but couldn’t tell you what they meant to save my life. Interesting.  I think people can sense the meaning of the song in the tone of voice, tempo, key, rhythm etc.; the elements of a song may speak as loudly to some people as the lyrics.  That may be the key to why so many songs seem to cross lines of nationality, language and identity.  They just sound good.  It all begs the question, what do we really value about our music,  the meaning that the creator intends or the feeling we get when we hear it performed.  Some may think that a dumb question, but the next time you’re listening to something where you don’t fully understand the lyrics, stop and ask yourself, is this emotional response I’m having what the musician and songwriter had in mind and does it matter?