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Post by wombat on Nov 7, 2016 15:48:52 GMT
I dont know if its too much vari-speed trying to get the phil spector thing.... this was the trick they used to great (And awful) effect for the first few albums, really piling it on thick here and there... and then seemed to lighten up on it as time went on.
Or if its a case of so many backing vocals mixed loud and competing with everything else.
They arent Deep Purple. You can't really have "everything louder than everything else".
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Post by wombat on Nov 7, 2016 14:15:55 GMT
Does anybody have a timeline as to which tracks on Arrival were recorded first and which were last etc?
When I Kissed the Teacher has an excellent beginning, if you get a version that isnt terribly compressed, when the whole band kicks in, its like a cannon.
But after that, there are points when the layering and over-dubbing seems to get muddy, its the same thing that plagued the mixes on the album before this.
Other songs on Arrival seem better about this. There probably isnt a very good explanation but if When I kissed the Teacher was mixed first... maybe they finished it and decided, "maybe we should go for a more open sound". Just a guess, I have no idea.
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Post by wombat on Nov 1, 2016 13:21:54 GMT
I'm keeping my fingers crossed and I hope it will be good. I'm wondering if it will be a virtual concert performance, I'd like that. I think both of their concert movies were pretty good.
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Post by wombat on Oct 27, 2016 18:04:12 GMT
I'm wondering, like you, if it will be some kind of holographic psuedo concert experience, where you can somehow view it from multiple 3d angles.
I imagine the technology is already there... the girls could find the old costumes and the production company could hire models and watch the concert films, then mimic the movements and film against a green screen. There is surely enough footage of the girls' faces and heads at all angles, to be able to somehow super-impose them onto the heads of the models used..
in abba talk, just a massive series of visual over-dubs. It might work, but that wouldnt support being able to watch the entire concert like that, only the human figures.
In any event, its just exactly what they keep giving us instead of a real reunion... another trip into the Abba time-machine.
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Post by wombat on Oct 27, 2016 15:26:48 GMT
This is apparently big news, as it has just made its way over to 2 musicians forums I read.
Most are mis-interpreting it to read as a physical real -in-the-flesh reunion by Abba, which it isnt, and I still dont think ever will be, but, who knows. Maybe if people are interested enough in this even Benny will agree to do one more show or something.
20 years ago you would have NEVER seen musicians discussing Abba in any kind of conversation. This just goes to show how their music has been re-discovered, and judged favorably, by a lot of people who previously did not like them.
of course there are, and always will be, a large number of people that STILL dont like them.....
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Post by wombat on Oct 27, 2016 12:55:00 GMT
It's a shame that when all is said and done wasn't released fully. Is it me or is Like an angel passing through my room musically and lyrically haunting? Just my opinion, but to me, its dull and the click track is annoying. I'd put it right up there with one of the worst things they ever recorded. however I'm sure I'm in the vast minority with that opinion, a lot of people love the song.
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Post by wombat on Oct 26, 2016 15:39:50 GMT
"It’s exciting when a band gets back together, though. Especially when elsewhere in pop you’ve got Abba, whose refusal to get on with it is bordering on trolling.
Why wouldn’t they get back together? I suppose they made all the money in the world – I mean, we’re not doing it for the money either – but I don’t know. Maybe the need for each other is not there. You see, I still think there’s a certain need for each other in our band. In a strange way. We’re umbilically tied together, somehow. Without one of us, we’re incomplete."
I think she answered the question herself... there is no need for each other in Abba. Benny has no need for Abbas music as he has gone light years beyond that. The others I dont know about.
Who knows maybe one day... but I dont think it will ever happen.
The difference between Abba and Fleetwood Mac is that the individual members of the Fleetwood Mac group (or most of them) continued to play and record and perform on their own, as solos, the whole time.
In Abba, you have members that are more or less retired from music.
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Post by wombat on Oct 25, 2016 13:05:45 GMT
We have survived the horror of Put On Your White Sombrero "the horror of Put On Your White Sombrero"?! that awful warbling in Frida's vocal on that, is really out of control. I cant listen to it either.
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Post by wombat on Oct 24, 2016 13:58:49 GMT
Its a very good album, the recording and mix are right at the top of everything they did. The intro to One of Us is one of my very favorite things they ever recorded.
Still, there are some tracks I skip, and the overall mood of the album is such a downer... I much prefer Arrival, back when they seemed a lot happier and the music was more playful.
Similar to a discussion I had with other classical music fans, they all loved the Mighty Ludwig Von and I liked Mozart.
Actually my favorite track on The Visitors is the often-hated Two For the Price of One. So there it is.
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Post by wombat on Oct 24, 2016 13:45:31 GMT
But again, you're suggesting Abba do what other bands do, and it doesnt work like that. In the first place, Pink Floyd has Dave Gilmour doing hi profile tours where he plays a bunch of Pink Floyd; Paul McCartney does the same thing with the Beatles songs, and Fleetwood Mac is a current recording and touring band. These artists have good reason to mine their back catalogue, as they are currently performing it[...] I don't basically disagree with you. I'm keeping the debate going partly to help try and prevent this forum becoming the Agnetha Faltskog Internet Photo Archive, and also to go out to bat a bit for those who repeatedly shell out their hard-earned on every ABBA release, even though I'm not one of them (my collection of ABBA stuff is paltry by any standard - I only own a few of the studio albums, and don't care about collecting picture discs or coloured vinyl. There's too little time and too much good contemporary music being put out to keep up with all the re-releases by oldie bands as well). You do wonder how many more tours McCartney and Gilmour and Fleetwood Mac have left in them. They'll all be hanging up their stage-boots before long, but when they have I bet they still continue to put out more generous reissue packages than ABBA have up to now. I'm not suggesting that B&B should feel obliged to do what these other artists have done and are doing; just that it would reflect on them favourably, help mitigate the hard-nosed ABBA-as-brand stuff and offset their reputation for being proscriptive old perfectionists, if they did do something similar. Haha to the Agnetha Internet Photo Archive. For some reason, every Abba web forum I've ever visited, ends up having at least part of it turned into a big photo shrine to her. What we're seeing with this demand to hear all the old warty and unloved cast-offs in the Abba vault, is the sort of outrage from a small part of the worldwide abba fan base. The outrage from the collectivists who demand to be able to hear and obtain every single thing they ever recorded, to complete their own personal shrine. There are collectivists in every rock band cult. The Beatles for one, an almost manic obsession to "GET IT ALL and then I can be happy." IT doesnt matter WHY Bjorn and Benny wont release it. Its THEIR music, it does not belong to the fans, much as they clamor that it does. Its irrelevant that other bands open their vaults. Bjorn or maybe just Benny, own it all and they dont want to, they have no need to, Abba is long over for both of them, they have other interests, and thats the end of it. Of course thats just my speculation. But it does seem that way. I dont need to hear every little thing. In the first place, I go weeks, even months, without hearing Abba. You're right, there's so much other great music to listen to. So all these cries of I MUST HAVE THE FINAL VERSION OF JUST LIKE THAT, fall on deaf ears. Its just a song. It doesnt bother me. And really, when you get down to the truth, its more than likely not ever going to see the light of day, and so, its just a lot easier to not get upset and gnash teeth that theres a lot of unfinished abba music the collectivists arent ever going to hear because they are not Magnus Palmer. Keep calm and just listen to all the great music they gave you already.
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Post by wombat on Oct 21, 2016 13:58:27 GMT
Me and my wife often listen to this album and cannot believe Stig heard it and thought it wasn't good or there was not a hit.
She says he probably was secretly terribly jealous and that's why he was ugly about it.
I didnt even like Abba at the time I heard the album, but I went right out and bought it immediately, its always been one of my favorites.
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Post by wombat on Oct 21, 2016 13:43:18 GMT
Abba isnt Fleetwood Mac or the Beatles or Pink Floyd, and its unrealistic to expect them to take cues from what these other bands do, or did. Well, they've taken enough style cues over the years; not minting them but appropriating and adapting a number - 'British invasion' pop in pre-ABBA days, Euro schlager, glam and glitter pop, West Coast AOR, disco and electropop - and now they've show that they're prepared to try and ride the luxury/bespoke vinyl wave by putting out this certificated half-speed mastered double disc version of Arrival, so it's not outlandish to reckon on them putting out tranches or exclusive material on re-releases at this stage, rather than the usual tidbits. As you say, ABBA were never a road band, nor were they a studio jam band, and they'd never be in a position to serve up what Pink Floyd have, say, on their various expanded releases, in terms of live recordings or jams or what have you, but you'd imagine that if they were of a mind they could at least stretch to what Fleetwood Mac did with their re-releases of the Buckingham-Nicks era albums, and include a disc of alternate or demo versions of every track on the released-as-was original album. Maybe B&B never used a recorder when they were working in their hut on Viggso; just scribbled the chords and changes down and kept the rest in their heads? But again, you're suggesting Abba do what other bands do, and it doesnt work like that. In the first place, Pink Floyd has Dave Gilmour doing hi profile tours where he plays a bunch of Pink Floyd; Paul McCartney does the same thing with the Beatles songs, and Fleetwood Mac is a current recording and touring band. These artists have good reason to mine their back catalogue, as they are currently performing it. Abba is not and more importantly, its pretty obvious that at least one of the members, Benny, has long ago moved onto other things and seems to more or less want to put Abba in his rear-view mirror. He has no reason, financial or musical, to put out material he decided wasnt good enough, 30 years ago. You guys all got some of that with Abba undeleted and the working path to Like An Angel Passing Thru My Room... and it sounds like that wasnt enough for you, now you're all convinced theres a gold mine of fully finished works that you demand to be in possession of. And I'm not sure who owns the rights to Agnetha's old recordings; Cupol, or whoever owns Cupol, does. And a handful of people complaining about it on a web forum isnt going to change Benny's mind. At least I dont think so,,, then again I never expected the Wembley album so what do I know. I cant read his mind.
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Post by wombat on Oct 20, 2016 18:45:09 GMT
" and it turned out that just the "creating the music" stories were more than enough to fill the pages of this book with interesting and fascinating stories."
what does this mean? Anybody know? Did he have recent interviews with Benny or Bjorn or M Tretow?
I dont want to end up spending money on something like Abba: The Treasures, which I looked forward to, and it was really just the memories of their wardrobe assistant. There was one interesting diagram, the stage set up for the 1979 show, but other than that, not anything I was interested in.
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Post by wombat on Oct 19, 2016 17:14:28 GMT
Was the Abba Complete Recordings book ever updated? I remember he was trying to raise money to support it. He's a great guy and has personally answered a bunch of questions I had... but the original book was a complete disappointment, with only a few recording technique tidbits to offer.
I had no interest in reading a book where he described listening to a bunch of alternate versions of tunes that we would probably never get to hear.
What I'd like, and what will never happen, would be a DVD video where Bjorn and Benny cue up the old multi-track mother tapes of songs and let us hear the tracks isolated, and explain what they were doing, and let us hear all the stuff they recorded for each song that either didnt make the final mix or got buried so far we'd never know it was under there. Benny did that once I think, maybe Ring Ring or something.
Sure, other bands have done that. That doesnt mean Abba should or will ever. One thing to consider is that these other bands that were mentioned up above, Pink FLoyd, Fleetwood MAc... these are active bands. They tour and record. Not Abba. That band is dead. And Benny acts like he wants it that way, he has no interest in spending a lot of time resurrecting it, for any purposes.
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Post by wombat on Oct 19, 2016 14:08:50 GMT
that was great, thanks. I'd seen bits and pieces of that in quotes but never the whole article.
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Post by wombat on Oct 19, 2016 13:33:27 GMT
We are owed absolutely nothing, and therefore there is nothing to reward. No artist ever owes anything, or is owed anything (the best art is usually made out of inner necessity and gets created regardless). At the same time there's something somehow distasteful about whipping up expectation for a re-release and then failing to include something substantially new. Bands bigger than/as big as ABBA (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac) have all dug deep into their vaults, and you'd think ABBA would jump at the chance to be associated with this sort of late-career gesture of largess. Abba isnt Fleetwood Mac or the Beatles or Pink Floyd, and its unrealistic to expect them to take cues from what these other bands do, or did. Benny and Bjorn apparently have no intention of releasing half-finished tracks or anything they have determined was not their very best, and as far as I'm concerned, there is wisdom in that. Some fans have the collector thing happening and they will be irritated with that refusal to open the vaults. Personally, I think Benny and Bjorn are just guarding their legacy of perfection and have no desire to taint it. I've heard stuff on bootlegs and its not anywhere near as good as what they released officially. And in the words of Bjorn, on the TV show "welcome to sweden".... he said "Why would I want any more money?" They have no financial need to open the vaults. And Sony or Universal or whoever owns the rights to their old recordings, cannot crack the vault open so its safe to say they may NEVER be opened. And I'm fine with that.
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Post by wombat on Oct 19, 2016 13:24:47 GMT
Wombat - from your studio experience, what are the dangers of becoming 'sound blind' (i.e. hearing tracks over and over and over and getting to the point of not knowing whether the changes you're making to them are rendering things better or worse) and how can you best guard against the danger? For instance, when do you know if something has become too perfect, so to speak, and should have just been left alone? And within ABBA, who do you think would have had the final, FINAL say? Benny, Bjorn (or third party)? Surely (in reality) both couldn't have had an equal veto, even if it appeared that way superficially? They must have disagreed quite often - I wonder who would have been more inclined to say 'OK - you win!'. theres an audio phenomena known as "ear fatigue". When you sit in front of a pair of studio monitors for hours, listening to it over and over, it wears your ears out and you may find you make mixing adjustments... and when you finally stop and listen again the next morning, it sounds terrible. Partly due to the way the ears and brain respond to extended deep listening. Basically your ears get tired and you might respond by cranking the upper mids up and up and up because your hearing isnt responding properly, due to fatigue. So good advice is to not work on something for extended periods of time. Take a break, overnight if possible. The second way of combating this is to listen to mixes over various sources. A boombox. A car stereo. Headphones. A crappy little laptop speaker. I have a crapply little boombox I use as a baseline - if it sounds good on that, it has a good chance of sounding good on most playback systems. Bass levels will differ in every single playback and at that point, its up to the user to determine how loud the bass is. Bass is really tricky. I was recommended to pick up "the best" version of Abba's Arrival CD, a german polydor version. I bought it and while the sound was clear, it was very trebly and had almost no bottom end. In terms of arrangement, and where to stop, that gets difficult if you are working by yourself. Its hard to know when to stop fooling with a track. My old art college professor had a saying, "How many artists does it take to do a painting? Two. One to paint and the other to chop the painters arms off when its finished". In the case of Abba, by 1978 or so, they had their own studio and unlimited time on their hands... endlessly toying with every song probably did become an issue, to a certain extent. The problem with them, that huge layering of tracks, is the way they worked, it was how they developed their signature sound. So when the norm of working is to pile on zillions of overdubs, how do you know when to stop? Regardless of how important Tretow was to their sound, and he was, I would think the final decision was always the band. Maybe Benny and Bjorn but possibly all four had to like it before it was released. Who knows. There were possibly songs that were never released or melodies that didnt go anywhere because Bjorn and Benny couldnt agree that they both liked it. Bjorn often spoke about democracy in the band.
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Post by wombat on Oct 18, 2016 13:15:18 GMT
OnlyAbbaForMe said:
"Fans both better Audio sound & Bonus Tracks, that are a special treat. Unfortunately, rewarding 'The Fans' is beyond Benny & Bjorn."
and this is exactly what I'm talking about.
Bjorn and Benny worked their cans off for nine or ten long years to give you the music you already have. Personally, I'm happy with what they gave us, and knowing how much work went into it, how it totally dominated their lives, its enough.
They gave you a museum to go to. They gave you a remixed concert in disc.
I dont know what else "rewarding the fans" means. This obsessive, demanding mindset in some abba fans puzzles me.
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Post by wombat on Oct 18, 2016 13:11:32 GMT
Waterloo said:
"Seriously, if B&B don't want anything else to be released, may it be. But these constant re-releases of things we all own multiple times really annoys me as it is not a treat for the fans but a rather mean way to milk the few remaining people who closely follow the group decades after their separation, as it is rather unlikely that the average fan will go for such an expensive vinyl-release."
They've made it clear over and over that they aren't going to open their vaults and release things they did not think were good enough to release before. Collectors are going to have to deal with this fact.
I dont think you can blame anybody in Abba for this endless re-packaging of the same music. The group has been dead for almost 40 years and yet there's still high interest in them.
As long as people keep buying, this stuff will keep coming up for sale.
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Post by wombat on Oct 14, 2016 14:38:47 GMT
well nobody beats mozart.
I'd heard the track on the visitors reissue, it didnt take long after the CD was released before a bunch of people ripped it and loaded it to youtube. Its quite interesting and shows how they worked.
Anybody who ever worked very hard on a project, and put hours and hours into it... only to find at the end, their work was thrown out or left on the cutting room floor.... I often wonder if thats how the girls in abba felt, singing over and over and over and then finally having whatever song they were working on, discarded.
Maybe they just got used to it. Maybe sometimes it was the girls who decided they didnt like the track and wanted it either changed or discarded.
I did read one story that sometimes they would get mad at Bjorn for making them sing parts over and over.
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Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 16:40:57 GMT
haha! Fafner, is that your vocal?
its too bad they didnt release the version of Like An Angel Passing at the end of that video... I much prefer that to the dull version on the album
a tune I'd probably rate as the worst thing they ever did... right behind The Day Before You Came. There's nothing like a dull cut and paste drum line to make me hit "next".
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Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 14:50:12 GMT
The Visitors is unique in so many ways - including the recording and mix.
There are a few things to consider and ponder "why" the drums suddenly jump out on this album.
First off, someone once mentioned that The Visitors has an unusually large number of tracks with just one girl singing or the other, and not so much both singing in harmony all the time. That may have a tiny little bit to do with it.
But probably not. You are right, in mixing, when you start pouring on the vocal overdubs, there's a buttload of middle and middle hi frequencies, the same frequencies as the drums... and they both cant occupy the same limited space. In the immortal words of the goddess Marilyn - "something's got to give".
And Abba certainly poured on the vocal overdubs. They didnt get that sound with just one or two tracks of Frida and Agnetha. You can tell its literally a choir of them at times, even the lead vocal. When you double or triple track, you get a huge, thick sound, just by varying the tiny fluctuations of overtones caused by tiny differences in each take.
This is common in guitar too. Rarely do you get a big time guitar riff that was just played and recorded once. To thicken it up, you'd do it two or three times and then it all gets mixed down together and sounds gigantic.
But back to the point. In the earlier albums, with the huge vocal, I think all three of them (benny bjorn and tretow) made a decision to push the drums in the back, to allow the vocals as much room as possible. In the 70s, there were a lot of acts that pushed the drums back, even hard rock acts did it at times, listen to Blue Oyster Cult. The soft snare thing wasnt Abba's idea either - disco and fleetwood mac were great at using the soft snare attack, altho they pushed it forward in the mix and Abba held it back.
By the 90s, the industry standard was the opposite - the loudest thing in the mix was often this big loud cracking snare drum, and the kick drum, and all the other drums sort of more distant. Even with hard rock.
In the early 80s, the drums were beginning to sound a little louder in many forms of music...and just like synthi-pop, Abba may have just cloned what others were doing. A lot of the early synthi-pop duos used early drum machines for their work, and those were stripped down, easier to mix soundbytes and therefore with a sparcer sound, probably easier to push the drums forward.
So theres lot of reasons "why". And those I listed might be all wrong. It could be something completely different like "Stig made us fire our old drummer and we like our new one so much that we made him loud". haha
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Post by wombat on Oct 13, 2016 13:41:12 GMT
We took a long drive over the weekend and listened to a lot of Abba. The stereo speakers are in the front and I was sitting in the back.
So I got a sort of "distant listen" to a wide range of Abba songs.
Two things I noticed. The girls' voices are mixed much louder than anything else. If Abba has a defining sound, its the voices of the two girls mixed together. When listening over headphones or closer speakers, its not so apparent. Remove yourself from the sonic picture a little bit, and what you hear is the voices with "some stuff in the background".
Abbas' drums thru most of their career are mixed so soft and buried so far down, they're at times almost non-existent. Often all you can really hear is a soft, fluffy snare keeping time. However towards the end of their career, especially The Visitors, the drums are much louder in the mix... in my opinion, a welcome change.
As a friend of mine remarked.... "finally they get the drums right... and then they break up."
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Post by wombat on Sept 29, 2016 17:12:52 GMT
"OMG, it's like a game of telephone around here. I never said anyone wasn't "allowed" to make any music. People can do whatever they want. But I am still entitled to my opinions (along with everyone else... everyone else is entitled to MY opinions. LOL). I just choose to feel that, unless music comes from an honest, genuine place, it's not worth my time and attention."
How can you suggest that a white person playing the blues cannot come from an honest, genuine place? That makes no sense and really, sounds quite racist.
but then below, heres something I do agree on you about, for the most part -
"That being said, perhaps it was a good thing for ABBA to split up when they did. Even though they all seemed amicable all the way to the end, who knows what raging storms they kept under tight wraps? Having to continue working with your ex(es) has to take a psychological toll after a while, especially when they re-marry, have more kids, etc. That being said, I can totally understand A and A wanting to take a break from working with B and B (and vice versa). But why didn't A and A ever work together on their own projects (like B and B)? Just based on their onstage chemistry, I got the vibe that they were super-close, like, practically sisters. Even during their final full(ish) live performance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1981, they were linked arm-in-arm, hip-to-hip for most of the show... like best buddies. Even without B&B's songs, I could imagine that they would have been quite a successful act. Even at their reunion in June, even though they sounded shaky at times, that unmistakable harmony/blend was still there."
Abba was really unique in a bunch of ways. I've been in bands that dissolved because of divorce, one band had a CD out and tour lined up, management, the whole nine yards. Chick singer announced she was divorcing the drummer, he bails, the whole thing folded like a house of cards right out from underneath me.
The fact that Abba survived divorces between every single member of the band, and still continued... is almost unthinkable to me. I'm sure they all had reasons that I couldnt comprehend and they certainly had achieved a level of success... and possibly a level of responsibility to a huge machine that depended on them... I could never comprehend that either.
The fact the Frida and Agnetha never worked together after Abba, to me, smacks of the possibility of a frosty relationship towards the end, and the hugging and smiles were just more of the fake it for the camera thing they seemed to be phoning in for the last year or so. Thats just my speculation and I might be 100% wrong.
And I thought the harmonies in the June thing were often really bad. Especially for their standards., Somebody was really out of scale here and there.
But hey, I couldnt do it, so, what do I know....
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Post by wombat on Sept 28, 2016 14:11:30 GMT
just curious, how are you remixing these? Do you have a DAW like ProTools or Sonar or Ableton?
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Post by wombat on Sept 26, 2016 13:17:35 GMT
Here's another perspective on the statement that white boys shouldnt be allowed to play blues, or whatever.
I've lived in the USA all my life, and I've played in several working blues bands, in the southern usa, where blues are still somewhat popular. Every single one of these blues bands, was racially mixed... black guys and girls and white guys and girls, working together, to make music. There was no discrimination whatsoever, just people digging the music, and, every other blues band on the circuit, was the same way.
One of my closest friends was a bass player who is black. This is what he told me about all this, I'm paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it -
"White boys didnt steal the blues. They saved the blues from going extinct. If it wasnt for people like Elvis and the Rolling Stones, blues would have been forgotten. White musicians saved it from obscurity. And Chess Records would have gone out of business if it wasnt for all those American white boys buying up all those Muddy Waters records."
Another black guy once told me, "Black people dont listen to blues anymore. My young nephew is into rap and he says blues are "Sharecroppers music". You dont see young black musicians playing blues, not usually. They like rap and hip hop and r&b. Only the older black generation still likes blues. The only young musicians playing blues, carrying it forward, are white."
None of these are absolute truths, there will always be exceptions. And there were some white rock artists that were notorious for ripping off the old blues masters. Even so, there was already precedent for that... the blues tradition was built on openly borrowing from others and no credit given. Sure, this all changed when money came into it, and I'm not excusing these bands that made a mint off old blues tunes and didnt properly credit the authors... if you could even figure out who the author was.
In my opinion, the reality is completely the opposite of all that. The guys that stole that music are the exception. The fact that you ever heard blues at all, is probably because white musicians found musical solace and inspiration in the blues.
Its curious to read someone saying "so and so shouldnt be allowed to play certain music" on an Abba forum. That's like saying gay men shouldnt be allowed to play Abba songs because nobody in Abba was gay. That's silly too.
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Post by wombat on Sept 23, 2016 16:32:37 GMT
I saw the most famous Fleetwood Mac lineup in concert, late 70s or so, big stadium concert in Florida. They were very good and the big crowd adored them. I like all their albums up to Rumours - I didnt like Tusk so much or anything after that. I really prefer the older lineups, but thats just me. From what I've read, at least Benny and Frida really liked the Rumours album.
One thing both bands discussed here do NOT have in common - Fleetwood Mac was self-contained. They normally created all their music with only the people in the band and conceived and arranged every single note themselves. Not so with Abba, who always employed at least a great drummer, bass player and lead guitar player, who were indispensable to their sound. Who knows what these guys came up with musically in the sessions, I read somewhere that they did contribute ideas, and were not credited as such on the albums... but were well compensated financially.
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Post by wombat on Sept 23, 2016 13:22:38 GMT
Is it really? Its very good, I almost listed it, but, I prefer the swedish and german stuff.
My Colouring Book is great - the recordings, mix and especially the unique arrangements are terrific, and her voice is in fine form.
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Post by wombat on Sept 22, 2016 13:11:28 GMT
" But I do have an implicit bias when it comes to white people, especially English musicians, playing music that directly borrows/appropriates the music borne of the oppression of black people in the American South (Blues)"
then you must hate most of rock music in the 70s, and, all the riffs Abba AND Fleetwood Mac lifted over the course of their successful careers. Listen to Ring Ring or the end of Waterloo. Actually its everywhere. The end riff of The Chain. Half of all rock and roll can be traced back to Chuck Berry, who took most of his from 12 bar blues.
And what about Abba doing disco, which wasnt exactly about oppression, but still borne of a primarily black form of music, funk?
"As white, heterosexual men in a white, heteronormative society, what gives them the right to be singing the blues? "
oh boy. You got to be kidding. Because only black people can feel true sorrow, right?
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Post by wombat on Sept 16, 2016 20:34:33 GMT
excellent thank you. thats my mp3 picture for "Crazy World"
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