Geoglyph

This is an amazing EP!!

A very interesting on-topic interview of Philip Glass:
 
https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philip-glass-on-controlling-your-output-and-getting-paid-for-what-you-make/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=facebook_page&utm_medium=NewMusicBox&utm_content=Philip+Glass+Shares+His+Thoughts+on+the+Digital+Music+Economy

Lovely music right there!

Don't forget to share more!

Made this a little while back, but forgot to share!
 
Geoglyph

I missed this thread when I first joined! I'm Geoglyph, I live in Bristol and I write psy dub (and hopefully psybient too).
 
I also play the flute and piano, and I DJ dark psytrance occasionally. (My darkpsy name is Espertine.)

I missed this thread when I first joined! I'm Geoglyph, I live in Bristol and I write psy dub (and hopefully psybient too).
 
I also play the flute and piano, and I DJ dark psytrance occasionally. (My darkpsy name is Espertine.)

There was some talk about Spatialize's first album 'Dryad's Bubble' on other topic and had to press play on that immediately. Have to say that this sounds pretty timeless!
 

Yes, please do I recommend getting in touch with local psytrance nights/festivals near you and asking permission to contact their attendees. Your study will be more valuable if you can give a precise location where it took place. The idea of a massive worldwide study conducted over the internet is exciting, but very difficult. For example, how will you contact Russian, Japanese or Brazilian psytrancers?
 
Good luck!

How wonderful! You will find a lot of academics writing about psytrance in England. (Including me.) In fact, we're holding a conference in June, if you haven't heard of it already...

How wonderful! You will find a lot of academics writing about psytrance in England. (Including me.) In fact, we're holding a conference in June, if you haven't heard of it already...

PS I just downloaded 'On the Edge of Forever' for free. I promise I will be more generous next time I'm just quite inspired by that album right now. And broke.

Hey! Tell us more about your study. What is it about, and where are you based? 
 
G

If I might, I'd love to chime in with a couple of thoughts from the wider musical world
 
I'm writing a PhD in urban ethnomusicology/popular music studies, looking at psychedelic trance and related musics, and one of the things that we are really interested in in this area is professional musicianship. In fact, one of the first questions that ethnomusicologists like to ask - whether we are studying a tribe in the Amazon basin, or a folk session in Durham, or punk music in China - is "who gets to be a musician in this culture?" and "who pays the musicians?"
 
I think that in Britain we tend to valorise professional musicians, and sometimes forget the colossal size and power of amateur music making. I suspect that this is true of other countries, too. There have been some very good anthropology-style studies of musicians in the UK, and what we've found is that "amateur" and "professional" are more like ideas than actual types of musician. Most musicians are somewhere on a spectrum with these ideas at either end. It's very possible for new musicians to get paid for a gig (more so than most musicians would have you believe!) but very difficult for even the most professional of musicians to make a living from gigging, and most (in classical, jazz and rock music) also teach or have another job.
 
What strikes me about electronic music today is that more an more people are teaching it in increasingly formal ways. I know quite a number of producers who offer lessons - and DJs also.
 
(I am a terrible DJ, but I had a lesson once, and also once had a paid gig. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but it was all great fun.)
 
The question is - how do you know if you are good enough to give lessons?
 
I'd love to hear your thoughts
 
G

If I might, I'd love to chime in with a couple of thoughts from the wider musical world
 
I'm writing a PhD in urban ethnomusicology/popular music studies, looking at psychedelic trance and related musics, and one of the things that we are really interested in in this area is professional musicianship. In fact, one of the first questions that ethnomusicologists like to ask - whether we are studying a tribe in the Amazon basin, or a folk session in Durham, or punk music in China - is "who gets to be a musician in this culture?" and "who pays the musicians?"
 
I think that in Britain we tend to valorise professional musicians, and sometimes forget the colossal size and power of amateur music making. I suspect that this is true of other countries, too. There have been some very good anthropology-style studies of musicians in the UK, and what we've found is that "amateur" and "professional" are more like ideas than actual types of musician. Most musicians are somewhere on a spectrum with these ideas at either end. It's very possible for new musicians to get paid for a gig (more so than most musicians would have you believe!) but very difficult for even the most professional of musicians to make a living from gigging, and most (in classical, jazz and rock music) also teach or have another job.
 
What strikes me about electronic music today is that more an more people are teaching it in increasingly formal ways. I know quite a number of producers who offer lessons - and DJs also.
 
(I am a terrible DJ, but I had a lesson once, and also once had a paid gig. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but it was all great fun.)
 
The question is - how do you know if you are good enough to give lessons?
 
I'd love to hear your thoughts
 
G

Since using Bandcamp and self releasing the music income now pays for music gear....software, synths etc. So it has become self supporting which is nice.
 
It's a little bit easier these days to combine creativity with a normal job as music technology is that much more immediate. For a few hundred quid you can stuff a pc with a fully functioning studio in a few hours. Back in the Atari / sampler / synths days putting a studio together was expensive and time consuming. Now you can lob a loop from Ableton into a sequencer and it will time stretch itself instead of spending a good couple of hours lining up a loop in a sampler. My first sampler had 8 mono samples, 30 seconds of mono sampling time and cost me £500 second hand. Do we appreciate this? Probably not, it probably just pushes our expectations up.
 
In general there are very very few people making a living from music nowadays. Even Philip Glass worked as a taxi driver and plumber while he wrote music for 18 musicians. Then within that larger music industry you have to realise that psy chill is a very very small niche. I think part of Ott's success (aside from writing very good stuff) is the fact that dub music has a certain crossover element. Dub and reggae is very popular with a broad range of people beyond the psychill community. He can tour America and play with other dub or dubstep artists as well as the psychedelic festivals. Good formula that.
 
Life did throw up the opportunity a few years ago to work more solidly on music. So I took it. And I can say that immersing yourself in something is a very worthwhile thing to do in life, particularly if it's something that you are really interested in. I definitely took my productions up to another level. Through teaching myself and asking questions on forums and now I know my way around the gear I can easily write good sounding music around a normal job (but then again I don't have children). But in terms of sitting down all day every day to write music, my experience is that it does suck a little bit of the magic or of it. But it also has its own rewards.
 
But that sense of achievement can be achieved in plenty of areas of life. Doesn't have to be music. Plastering, being a waiter, understanding finance... There's a joy in life from applying yourself to something and seeing the rewards. For sure. It makes more sense to throw that type of energy into something that you know will allow you to live well and enjoy your life.. But well...music has a beautiful lure. It may not be the sane or economic choice in life but, well, when that groove finally slots together, you can't beat that feeling.
 
My advice to anyone starting out in creating music is to enjoy the creativity more than the production, and allow the production side to gradually build up as you finish tracks. You can write /arrange good tracks without decent production (you can!) but you can't write decent tracks that connect with people if you've spent 10 years obsessing over compressors and limiters.
 
I hardly ever thought about production for years. I just made music. But when I heard Ott Hallucinogen in Dub I started to look more at that side of things. Ott definitely raised the bar in psychill..and I thought my music was pants in comprison. I had crap monitoring, terrible eq habits and hardly knew how to use a compressor... But you know what? It turned that Ott was listening to my first album (Dryads Bubble) in his car for ten years. For me that was proof that electronic music is still about creativity and expression... and not production values.

Stellardrone <3 https://stellardrone.bandcamp.com/
 
It's pay-what-you-want, too!