Can you make good music without knowing what you're doing?

>>72485621
Yes. Math doesn't make music sound good on it's own.

It's possible to perform a sequence of completely random movements in order to make a set of sounds that when combined form music

yes, but i'd take ages to do.

>>72485750
le bazinga

>>72485621
Depends on your definition of good music, in short, yes.

Could it be a benefit? Nope.

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Literally every famous rock star cant read music.

I read somewhere Kieth Richards learned how to play by just repeating what he heard off of records.

I guess some people are just born with autism

>>72485621
It's absolutely possible. It's just an inefficient and time-consuming way to go about it.

>>72485826
>autism

This word has been thrown around so much that it has lost its meaning.

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http://screenertv.com/celebs/lionel-richie-dave-grohl-the-beatles-13-artists-who-cant-read-music-and-why-thats-okay/

The King of Pop: Michael Jackson

John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in a profile of Jackson in GQ, "He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts ... Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts."

Dave Grohl

"I was never taught how to play the guitar," Growl told Rolling Stone. I don't know the chords to 'Everlong' [From 1997's The Color and the Shape"]. I only know what happens when I put my fingers there. But that riff is a good example of how I look at the guitar."

The Beatles

"The Fab Four"- John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and and Ringo Starr. Lennon told Playboy in 1960, "None of us can write it. But as pure musicians, as inspired humans to make the noise, [Paul and Ringo] are as good as anybody."


Slash

Lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses said in an interview during Snakepit, "No, I can't read music. I play by ear. I try to make what I want to hear, sometimes in my head, come out of my hands and into my guitar. When I write music, I usually write on my own at least to start."


Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix is praised by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music." In his biography, the singer, guitarist and songwriter, claims his inability to read or write music allowed him to focus better on the music he heard.

>>72485810
You don't think walking into creating music without knowledge of established rules could be a benefit? I'd think it'd probably be freeing

tyler the creator blew up before he knew how to read basic piano sheet music apparently
but then again he's a huge liar so who knows if that's true

>>72485912
>without knowledge of established rules
a lot of people on this board seem to have a very strange idea about what "music theory" is

>>72485912
I don't think it has any impact at all.

Pretty much all the greats dont know shit about music and they work like "i have a sound in my head and im going to recreate it on this instrument, and i will work on it like an autist until it sounds right and i dont know shit about music"

>>72486062
>Pretty much all the greats
lol who do you consider great?

>>72486091
just me

>>72485621
American Football's whole LP was a fluke. They didn't know shit about music theory but still made some really impressive math riffs.

>its a /mu/ thinks music theory is useless episode

yea boys, youre being so creative and uninhibited when you need 3 hours of guitar-fumbling to come up with a shitty 2 bar e minor riff

>>72486165
I'm just asking the question. I didn't say it was useless.

>>72486165
t. music major working in a coffee shop

>>72486062
Most musicians do know some principles of music theory, most producers also know music theory.

>>72486128
It wasn't much of a fluke, Mike Kinsella knows his stuff, same applies to Nick Reinhart (who always tells about not knowing music theory), they just don't base their compositions acknowledging theory concepts as lets say, Yngwie Malmsteen.

>>72485621
It's absolutely possible, but it'd be a lot more difficult than if you bothered to learn even basic theory. Especially if you didn't even know about scales and notes.

>>72485912
You're extremely likely to reinvent the wheel, not come up with something that hasn't been done before. If you think you have more creative potential in you than literal hundreds of years of music history you're deluded.

>>72486542
The idea that you should come up with something that hasn't been done before is extremely misguided anyway. Barring things like microtonality, everything already has a point of reference somewhere. For the most part there's nothing new to invent, no novel territory to explore.

That said, it isn't so hard to naively develop your own recognizable style.

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Music evolves with technology, a new technology creates a new sound.
I also was putting together a music book essentials, but then got tired, and discovered this book, which is a Marxist analysis of music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_of_Music

Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a non-fiction book by French economist and scholar, Jacques Attali.

Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (French title: Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique) is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. For Marxist critics, this idea is nothing new. The novelty of Attali's work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place:
Attali believes that music has gone through four distinct cultural stages in its history: Sacrificing, Representing, Repeating, and a fourth cultural stage which could roughly be called Post-Repeating. These stages are each linked to a certain "mode of production"; that is to say, each of these stages carries with it a certain set of technologies for producing, recording and disseminating music, and also concomitant cultural structures that allow for music's transmission and reception.

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>>72485846
We finally found a way to beat autism!

>>72485621
Not knowing any scales or chords is almost unrealistically incompetent and would definitely not be a benefit. That being said you don't really need to know anything beyond that and it can be a benefit to not be worried about whether the structure you're using is traditional to the genre or whatever.

>>72487019
>Not knowing any scales or chords is almost unrealistically incompetent and would definitely not be a benefit.

It worked out pretty well for New Order.

>>72486959
Got a download link? Looks interesting.

>>72487088
I don't get it

>>72487124
They pretty much didn't know shit but managed to write some successful and memorable songs anyway.

>>72486959
Repeating refers to the era of recorded and broadcast sound—roughly 1900 AD-present. During this period, notation (which could be thought of as a highly coded, written guide to how music should be sounded) was replaced by recording (which is the sounding of music, trapped and preserved on vinyl, tape or disc). During this era, Attali asserts that the goal of music is not memory or quality, but fidelity—the goal of those engaged in the musical project (which includes not only composers and performers, but sound engineers, studio execs and the like) is to record sound as clearly and flawlessly as possible, and to perfectly reproduce these recordings. In this era, each musical work is contrasted to the other versions of itself—the key question for the musician becomes: how faithfully can he re-produce the "original" recording? Attali calls this chapter Repeating, then, because each musical act is a repetition of what came before: music is made up of ever-more-perfect echoes of itself:

"The advent of recording thoroughly shattered representation. First produced as a way of preserving its trace, it instead replaced it as the driving force of the economy of music… for those trapped by the record, public performance becomes a simulacrum of the record: an audience generally familiar with the artist’s recordings attends to hear a live replication… For popular music, this has meant the gradual death of small bands, who have been reduced to faithful imitations of recording stars. For the classical repertory, it means the danger… of imposing all of the aesthetic criteria of repetition—made of rigor and cold calculation—upon representation." (Attali, 85)

>>72487193
Also important to Repeating are Attali’s ideas of Exchange-Time and Use-Time. Attali defines Exchange-Time as the time spent towards earning the money needed to purchase a recording, whereas Use-Time involves the time spent listening to recordings by the purchaser. In a society made up of recording labels and radio stations, far more recordings are produced than an individual can listen to in a lifetime, and in an effort to spend more time in Use-Time than in Exchange-Time people begin to stockpile recordings of what they want to hear. Attali states that this stockpiling has become the main method of use by consumers, and in doing so, shorter musical works have been valorized. More importantly, according to Attali, this process of stockpiling removes the social and political power from music. (Attali, 101)

Attali hints at a Post-Repeating era in his chapter 'Composing', but never fully develops his theory of it. While many readers consider this to be influenced by electronic musical techniques such as sampling, remixing and electronic manipulation (which were common in 1985 when the English translation was published), it is doubtful that they would have influenced Attali given that "Noise" was first published in French in 1977 (and one can assume the manuscript was completed at least several months prior to publication).

>>72487186
Yeah but they definitely knew scales and chords. Just not much else so it's exactly what I was saying in the first place.

>>72487336
They actually didn't know scales. A lot of the songs are modal because they literally didn't know any better.