singemonkey wrote
You certainly don't have to be apologetic about your opinions. No one was asking you to be. Neither are you being asked to respect anyone else's. But you should respect the people who have those opinions - rather than assuming they're going to tell you Page is a technical wizard or that they're offended by your distaste for cover bands. Give them the respect of letting them answer you rather than answering for them.
I'm not saying people can't have their own opinions nor was I intending on disrespecting anyone else's, I was breaking down the argument of what you can gain by being in a cover band and technique wise it all depends on what you're used to listening to in the first place which is where the Jimmy Paige thing came in. If you come into a cover band after being an Eric Johnson fan and working on getting to where he is technique wise (songwriting, feel etc are subjective) then you're not going to gain much technique from being in a cover band.
singemonkey wrote
And btw, I can call you an asshole (I'm not, btw) and no amount of ?? s will help if the context suggests you're serious.
You've never met me, I'm not serious - My humour may not come across very well via text but I'm definitly not serious.
singemonkey wrote
I'm certainly not offended.
Good, I never intended for you to be. I just don't like the whole concept of cover bands - It's as simple as that. I'm sure given the choice most people in cover bands would prefer if they could make the same living off of originals, and that's the point. I'd rather hear originals and I'd rather see the local industry grow and be more accepting of bands that play originals.
singemonkey wrote
But you're confabulating different issues here. People's defense of bands that are past their prime? What's it got to do with covers? People claiming guitar players like Jimmy Page are technical wizards? What's that got to do with covers? People preferring cliched songs? What's that got to do with covers?
Yet again using examples to outline that being in a cover BAND (there's that word again) isn't necessarily going to help with anything. It may yes, but there's no guarantee it's going to improve you - personally it made me lazy cause I was playing stuff I didn't have to work as hard at to get right.
singemonkey wrote
Basically it sounds like you're putting all your pet peeves into one argument whether they fit there or not. I agree with you on some of these points. What I don't agree with is that they have any particular relevance to whether covers are bad.
COVER BANDS! BANDS! As in people who play other people's music for money! Not people who sit in their room and learn a Clapton lick they thought was cool, the people who put all those licks together to form a Clapton song and then go out and market themselves so as to get money off of that Clapton lick they didn't write instead of simply using it to expand their own vocabulary.
singemonkey wrote
Learning stagecraft from DVDs is as good as learning from playing live? C'mon. Do you really think so?
I said:
I hardly think that being in a cover band is the only way to attain stage persona.
Meaning that there are other ways of learning to perform - not saying just watch DVDs, though you can learn a little from them. I'm saying that being in a cover band is not the begining and end to how to perform well. You can learn just as much stagecraft from being in an original band or you could talk to people in bands who you know get an audience going really well and find out what they find works, objectively break down their "moves" so to speak and learn from that.
singemonkey wrote
You could have learned the same stuff without playing covers? How do you know? How can you tell what your experience would have been like if you'd done it completely differently? You might have been sitting home right now writing 20 variations of the Kill 'em all lick ? Point is, your experience made you hate cover bands, but didn't do you any harm as a musician, did it. And it'd be difficult to argue that it didn't do you any good.
Okay I'll give you that it may have made me what I am now - but I'm not convinced that I couldn't have gotten there without it, to be honest the section of my life where my practice regimine took the biggest dive was then owing to the fact that I didn't have to keep my chops up so there's a very high chance that I could have been less limited technically by now if I hadn't joined a cover act or if I had just had more self-discipline. I think we're all just kinda destined to be ourselves musically and one can't guarantee that I wouldn't have ended up with a thousand ways to play kill em all but I like to think my ability to critique myself is a little bit better than that.
singemonkey wrote
You think it's ok to listen to covers of someone's stuff if they're dead, but not if they're alive? It kind of limits the number of people who get to experience their stuff. And what about when they're alive and past it? We shouldn't listen to their material from anyone else, even if the original artist can barely play? I dunno man.
I get what you're saying here but at the same time I can't help but feel that because we have proper recrodings of most artists doing there thing that maybe just maybe we don't need to hear someone else do it now. You can show someone an Eric Clapton album, you can't show someone a Francesco Tarrega album which kinda makes this a very grey area. Remember though that we're talking about cover BANDS and specifically this conversation revolves around S.A so the likelyhood of someone deciding you just really have to hear Robert Johnson and making it their personal mission to introduce his music to more people is incredibly slim at best. The cover bands I know and see are incredibly motivated by money and don't really do that kind of thing so it's radio specials and golden oldies.
singemonkey wrote
People put effort into original stuff = good music? Not my experience. A lot of bands seem overly focused on technical stuff or gimmickry and have never learned to put a song together. I'm not singling out any genre. That applies to all of them. So it's not uncommon to see a band that works really hard to produce boring, derivative stuff.
You can say that, and to a large extent a lot of South African original bands are derivative. You as an audience can decide where they go and if the market for original music gets bigger than more bands will pop up and hopefully the audience will be stringent enough to create a demand for bands that aren't derivative and then that whole scene will grow.
Having thought about this yesterday though that the ratio of awful original bands is pretty much equal to the amount of awful cover bands. I'm not gonna single anyone out particularly but I have seen a ton of both in this country and I find that as often as the original bands leave me cold the cover bands leave me annoyed because you know the songs they're playing and how awful a job they're doing at it. I have seen so many that are headed by female singers with either weak voices or no pitching ability, or by males who can't play guitar very well and kinda talk in a gruff lower register and try and pass it off as singing. Let's not even get started on the backing tracks (midi) some of the smaller ones use, I mean come on the cover bands in this country for the most part are equally as terrible as the original ones.
singemonkey wrote
The South African cover scene exists at the expense of the original scene? I kind of agree with you there. It would be nice if there was a path people could take to go from a successful covers career to a successful original music career. But at the same time, it's the audience demand.
Yes and people on this forum are some of that audience and they know people who count as that audience and they could change their attitudes towards these things, yes it would take a while for the original scene to pick up and improve but the cover scene has had ages to get it's act together and as I said above most of them still aren't very good either.
There's someone who's on this forum that's a friend of mine and he's always hopped from cover band to cover band becuase of the monatary rewards or he joins local original bands that are derivative because they're trying to make money for that exact reason but when he really opens up and plays something he's written that wasn't intended to be catchy or poppy or whatever my jaw just drops. I've heard so many amazing riffs, be they metal, rock or clean out of this guy and they're all very unique and watching him play them has always been such a pleasure but because of the mentality that is engrained in him he'll never share the good stuff with the rest of the world.
singemonkey wrote
So covers bands, I think, get to enjoy playing in front of an audience - whether honing their skills or just doing it because they enjoy it - and get paid to do it, and they wouldn't get to both play and get paid regularly any other way. I don't think their absence would result immediately in a huge rush of popularity for original music. People who play covers - some on this forum - often derive a significant proportion of their income from them - income that they couldn't guarantee playing originals. Is what they're doing so wicked that they should give up that income?
No it's not so wicked, what I'm preaching for here is a change in the mentality of the people who go out to watch bands so that people like this could stand on the same stage and rock out with their own original material and do just as well. Given better circumstances who'd rather play covers than originals? O_o
singemonkey wrote
Even in the USA, bands playing original music are only a modest part of the market for working musicians. Many would have to give up playing if they had to survive on their original music. And that's a very recent phenomenon. Throughout history, musicians didn't usually have to write to be musicians. Composers wrote. The odd folk singer added a new song to the standards that stuck. But mostly, they just played songs or pieces as best they could for an appreciative audience.
It's a sad state of affairs the whole world over, but that's not to say that there still isn't a great wealth of opportunity there. Thanks to the advances of society and modern technology we have tons of people who can now write and get amazing music out there. Whether you're into shred, blues, himalayan throat singers you can find someone doing it and it's become a considerable amount easier to find good stuff. I wouldn't want to go back to the old days of the musically elite removing the voice of the common man.
singemonkey wrote
Again I say, I'm not a huge fan of covers. I just think the intense feeling about them among SA musicians who like original stuff does more harm than good. They should be normalised, IMO. Where most young bands, or even new bands, would start playing a lot of covers to get audience interest and drop their originals into the line-up as they go along. Maybe I've missed something, but that still seems quite a common path for bands in the USA and Britain.
There have been countless attemps to normalize the South African music scene, but whenever a musicians union tries to form the bands around here simply undercut each other and ruin any attempt at raising the working standards of the countries musicians. I've never heard of any bands that I like doing covers and adding originals, not to say it doesn't happen or that it wouldn't be a great route for exposure but I don't think that approach would necessarily work for everyone cause you're not necessarily gonna make music that would sit that well with covers. I have spoken to people who've pointed out that on the occasions they've done this that they had to claim their own music was a cover off some obscure cd because mentioning that it was an original was often met with contempt - but this was in the local jazz scene, and it's a little screwed up on that side of the fence.
singemonkey wrote
I think it can be a big help, because bands can then tell whether a song needs a lot of work by how the audience receives it. If they're nuts for the covers, but the same people night after night use your original as the excuse to go to the bar, I'm thinking the song needs work.
I can definitly see where you're coming from there and to an extent I can agree with you, but it depends on the type of originals you make and to a large extent the audience, as I said I know people who had to lie about playing their originals...I mean wtf?
vic wrote
Re. the "Apartheid years"......I'm not convinced about your boss' comment. Many,well some musos left SA during the late 50's up to the late 70's. They include Manfred Mann (Durban), John Kongos (JhB), Mickey Most (Durbs and JhB, well he was an ex-Brit) , Freedoms Children and some others.
Manfred Mann and his group were big in the UK and even had no1 hits there and top 10's in the US; John Kongos and Freedoms Children had limited success BUT Mickey Most became the top producer during the 60's in the UK. He produced The Animals and Herman's Hermits and many more top acts of the decade. This guy surrounded him with the best at the time...including professional songwriters. The latter you don't find behind every bush so to speak. And it's in this department where we fail dismally in SA imho.
I know lots of South AFricans went off and succeeded but there are some shameful stories of the eras as well, I work with a guy who was offered a position as the bass player in King Crimson - He bought the letter from Robert Fripp to work and showed it to me, but now he works for an instrument wholesaler and plays in cover shows for extra income because the government at that time wouldn't let him leave. There are far less success stories than failures IMO and it's kinda sad that opportunities like this got stubbed. There's also Trevor Raibin, Matt lange and Kevin Shirley but the issue is that a lot of other great musicians never got that opportunity and not because of talent but silly things like paperwork.
vic wrote
It's easy to say "I only play my own stuff", but if you don't benchmark your work (and if it's substandard), one must re-think.
Well this is where self-critique comes in, my band recently decided to quit cause we weren't happy with what we were bringing to the table. It wasn't a hard choice to make, other bands need to learn to look at their own music more objectively I rate. I get it though, sometimes you get so caught up in what you've done that you become too invested in it to see the bigger picture. If their were a more functioning original scene then the bands that suck would get weeded out as the demand for better bands would destroy their popularity. Currently though there are too few bands to create the competitive edge the industry needs and too little a demand for more quality acts, so the bands that suck keep appearing wherever you go and the bands that are older, not better, get all the best slots.
vic wrote
Re. the cover circuit. I'm not aware of many 4- and 5-piece cover bands around. Most are 1-and 2- person shows with a guitar and some backtrax. I do not regard these as bands ??
I think these do count as bands, they bill themselves as such so that's kinda what they count as...Playing with backing tracks isn't illegal, it may be because of a lack of being able to find a competent player or it may be because of space limitations on the smaller bar stages. I will admit most of their backing tracks are awful, but they can still technically be classified as a band. I mean Simon & Garfunkel were two people...
vic wrote
Another thing...this money talk...do you honestly think that cover bands do it only for the money..? or is it just possible they do it for the love of playing music ?
If they loved playing music so much they'd make their own, the reason they're playing covers is because it earns them money. You could argue that it exposes them to bigger crowds and better times but then that's also about money, the original bands in this country shlep through playing at dingy little dives in front of 5 people often for free for the love of music, and this isn't to say they're bad bands. I've seen good bands play in front of 10 - 20 people for little or no money, often bands that are unique and have material that isn't derivitive but the apathy of the public yields low attendance. For what it's worth most of these guys could easily learn a cover set and go the easy way out, they don't because they love music and are willing to accept that there may be no monetary value in it.
Warren wrote
Sorry Chad, just not going to agree on a number of issues at all. Especially with regard to learning stagecraft from a DVD: there's no substitute for a live audience, covers or not. It's simply not the same playing live, in terms of equipment issues, anxiety, audience response etc. There's no other way to learn than to get out and play.
I hardly think that being in a cover band is the only way to attain stage persona.
That's what I said - again I meant you can learn all that stuff without being in a cover band. Not you can walk out on stage and entertain like BB King without putting in the miles but that your equipment will fail live and there will be anxiety (more in an original band than in a cover outfit because people won't just be judging your playing they'll be judging you) You don't have to be in a cover band to have a gig turn into a shit storm, you'll learn all about these things without playing someone else's music.
Warren wrote
You seem to be happy with your generalisations, so I'll leave it at that.
Yes, I am happy with my generalisations...now if only you wouldn't take them out of context...
