I've Got You Covered

Covers

     Music offers the unique ability to replicate another person's work and not have it be considered illegal or immoral. With the proper permissions, a musician can cover another band or artist's work. There are right and wrong ways to do this, as I'll try to explain briefly:

     The wrong way is to follow identically what a previous artist has already produced. Commonly, this includes most amateur pop/rock guitarists or vocalists- that is, many of the people who play only well-known and pre-established works. I've tried jamming with such people and, while they may sometimes provide good alternatives to the original in a cover band, they (let me express that I'm talking generally) cannot follow a jam session. This musicality leads to bad covering. Simply, it is being able to do nothing other than look up tabs and replicate.

     So let me explain the good cover bands/artists/pieces, so as not to simply sound arrogant and biased. To cover a piece well, you should dissect said piece. You should take it apart, identify all moving parts, and put it back together. Given this, you shouldn't put the music back together the same way you took it apart: you should piece each part together slightly different than how you originally found it. To cover isn't to copy. To cover is to take an already established piece of music and make it your own (but with obvious credit, where credit is due).

     My point overall, is that it takes far more musicality to cover correctly than it does to simply duplicate someone else's work. It's hard work, and it's so for a reason- because when you finish, the result is unique and amazing.

     I've personally worked on a few covers. That said, I never finished a project, for lots of reasons, but I don't mind- the process is fun. In my case, I generally take a unique piece from something, say Doctor Who or The Legend of Zelda, and replace certain leads (vocals, flute, etc) with a saxophone (what I play). After this, I play around with rhythms and dynamics. The product turns out delightfully different.

     Others have done things drastically different: I heard a metal song be turned into old school blues, and one of my favorite artists took a classical piece and flipped it into smooth jazz.

     Covering is an art- fitting, that it thrives in music. It is no place for narrow mindedness. I don't mean this to sound mean, rather to get people to understand that there's more to musical covers.

     Let the below works be an example (mp3/4 examples):

Two Part Invention in D Minor (Bach)

totally-not-randomly-selected-video

Two Part Invention #4 in D

(Eric Marienthal's Got You Covered album)

Big Gigantic

There's More than One Way

to

Use a Saxophone

     Today I'd like to feature Big Gigantic, a livetronica musical duet featuring a saxophone. While there's a lot of electronic DJ'ing, there isn't a whole lot of groups out there live-jamming it out with a saxophone, drums and DJ electronics. While I generally don't mind electrica type music, I still prefer musical groups capable of live performances: on this point, Big Gigantic wins me over on the one fact. However, the additional fact that they feature live drums and even a live saxophone intrigues me greatly.

     I was told about the group by a peer of mine from my class on campus. If I wasn't already into some pretty harsh stuff, I wouldn't have seriously looked into it, but since I have a lot of free time after said class, I gave it a look.

     And I'm glad I did.

Big Gigantic doesn't require a lot of explanation- you should simply follow the link below and hit "play" on their page, and listen. What makes them so great is, simply, that they're a lot of fun to listen to! It's high energy because they perform much like a live jam session you might see from big name jazz artists, while using the DJ modernization.

     I haven't much more to say on it, other than you should listen to some of the stuff. Sure, it's not for everyone, but you should at least try. It's a good example of thinking outside of the box, in terms of music making.

--Big Gigantic--

Foley Artistry

Picking Up Sounds

     I've written, before, about music technology, which touches on elements of both music and sound in different types of media. While I almost exclusively talk about music, for obvious reasons, there is another topic that has to do with music tech I'd like to write a bit about.

     Foley artists are those who create, or recreate, sounds for use in film. Foley is, of course, the sound effects used in the art. If you take a music tech course either in high school or college, you'll likely learn about the history of foley artistry. I won't go into too much detail now (as you should research on your own), but I will say that foley artists thrived in the 1930's. Anytime, now, that you look up a sound for a film you might be doing, from a YouTube video just for kicks, to a final for a film class in college, you've likely used some amount of foley that exists already on the Internet. While the Internet today gives us seemingly endless amounts of usable sound effects, it pays to look back in time and see that things weren't always so easy. Back in the early twentieth century, foley artists had to create all-new sounds themselves- from scratch. Some of the most recognisable sounds, those which first appeared in Star Wars, for example, were created by doing such things as plucking a tightly, vertically pulled slinky (this example gave us some of the laser blast sounds). From The Jazz Singer to the movie advancements of today, foley continues to be an important part of film making.

     But is it as popular now as it was then?

While there may have been a gap between the mid previous century and today, I feel strongly that there is an uprising of amateur foley artists. While pro foley artists have always been around simply due to their necessity in film making, the art of foley has become less known- an unfortunate fact, given that the art is most enjoyable.

     If you have even a decent recording mic and some software to manipulate audio files, you can try collecting and creating some of your own foley. If you're anything like me, you've been out in the world, and have heard a sound and wished you had been able to record it. It doesn't matter if you use them for anything, maybe not right away, but they're good to have and especially fun to create.

     In my case, I'd love to get recording some foley for my friends' videos that they create periodically. Like adding music to film, the right foley goes a long way to deepening the media. Most of what you watch on TV, be it a show or a film, has added foley. An example could be that, while shooting, everything was done perfect and went to final cut, however it was decided that a certain door opening wasn't loud enough. This is where foley recording might kick in.

     Probably the best part about recording foley is that you can be as creative as you want. It's an art for this reason. If you need to get the recording of a door opening, you don't have to record doors. You can find something else that has nothing to do with doors, yet produces the desired sound.

     I've only scratched the surface on foley artistry, especially for those who have never previously heard of it. I didn't go into details for two reasons: so that I wouldn't drag on and become a history professor, and that you might go research what it means to be a foley artist. Even if you don't look into the rich history, you can at least do some research into how you can get recording your own sounds today.