So I’m an old guy.\u00a0 I remember music from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.\u00a0 What do I miss?<\/p>\n
Clarity.<\/p>\n
If I go to live music today, it’s often so loud, it’s painful.\u00a0 Not only that, it’s so loud I can’t hear it.\u00a0 I can’t tell one instrument from another, and usually can’t hear the bass or keyboard at all.\u00a0 One or more of the band members might as well not be there.\u00a0 Sometimes even the lead singer.<\/p>\n
Loud noises make ears clench and shut down.\u00a0 I know a very talented guy who plays great guitar and bass.\u00a0 Sings good, too.\u00a0 But when I heard him and his band live, it was so loud it literally wasn’t musically audible.<\/p>\n
What’s up with that?<\/p>\n
Take the Rolling Stones, the original bad boys.\u00a0 Listen to the guitar lead-in to Satisfaction.\u00a0 (OK, so maybe I don’t remember the title or all the words, but I remember not getting any.\u00a0 It spoke to me.)\u00a0 Every note is distinct.\u00a0 Every word in the song is distinct.\u00a0 Every instrument is distinct (at least in my memory).\u00a0 There’s no doubt about what it says and how it says it.\u00a0 Even Bob Dylan, who sometimes get imitators these days who mumble incomprehensibly, and may have had a better guitar than a voice, had no trouble getting “lay, lady lay” across.<\/p>\n
But when I hear stuff today that’s loud and over-distorted – it just all runs together – and falls apart.\u00a0 Even if it’s as important as Abe Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, or Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain, it’s like trying to hear one voice in a screaming football game.\u00a0 Or trying to hear that killer guitar riff in an avalanche of screaming Skil saws.<\/p>\n
I recently listened to tracks laid down by someone I knew had to be good, whom I like and want to be good.\u00a0 But I couldn’t hear it for all the distortion and instruments smeared together.\u00a0 So with all due respect to musicians who are many times more talented than my thumb-plunking on a guitar –<\/p>\n
When you have something to say – please let me hear it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I’m an old guy.\u00a0 I remember music from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.\u00a0 What do I miss? Clarity. If I go to live music today, it’s often so loud, it’s painful.\u00a0 Not only that, it’s so loud I can’t … Continue reading