attn musicians, musicologists, people who know music-- help me understand
 

what exactly did jim o'rourke rip off from pink floyd's great gig in the sky for his through the night softly?

my ears can hear it clearly, but i lack the knowlege/theory to explain.

is it notes? is it what? i lack the language.

--
edit:
http://www.uploading.com/files/NFLZUUFJ/Jim_O'Rourke_-_Eureka_-_04_-_Through_the...mp3.html
i trust everyone knows the pink floyd track?

the immense overwhelming sense of boring suck?

;)

I have not heard o'rourke's tune.
tyou got a youtube link or something?
let's compare

this would be a very good question to ask me

hold on and let me listen to it and i'll tell you

i was going to help you, but then i dont have the jim o rourke song.

sorry it thought this was more common

it's from eureka

here's an upload:
http://www.uploading.com/files/NFLZUUFJ/Jim_O'Rourke_-_Eureka_-_04_-_Through_the...mp3.html

see theres the piano
the saxophone kinda going like the woman
lots of little bits & pieces

but what are the... how should i call this.. musical... qualities or relations that are being mimicked? fuck i need to study music.

something in the chord changes
if you ever watch live at pompeii, or the making of dark side of the moon on classic albums, when rick wright is messing about on the piano working out the chord sequence...yeah.

needless to say the great gig is an infinitely better song.


the sax is reminding you of us and them, not the great gig.

chord changes...

what's a "chord" and how does it "change"?

ha ha ha im so fucking ignorant

i really need to learn this shit

gotta go run some errands

eh cankers i found a painting of you in a gallery yesterday ha ha ha

i'll post later

thanks for the attempt to fit this subject into my ignorant brain

a chord...i'm not a trained musician and i can't explain properly but it's a group of notes played at the same time that sound good together and all the notes you hear at the same time make up what is called a chord.

the chord changes or sequence is how you get from one to another, usually in a scale but sometimes not in which case it will sound more dissonant.

chords are sets of 3-5 notes that all together resonate in one specific note. (barre chords/power chords, employ just the "bottom" and the "top" notes in a chord, and are very easy to use which is why most punk bands employ just barre chords.)

you can have 5 notes that when played together form a C, or a C# (sharp)

most rock music has three to four chords as the main basis for the song.

let's say a song starts in G, the guitarist strums the G chord 4 times, then he switches to a C chord. your ears can tell the difference, and the "change" is how he gets to that new chord.

real simple songs just go from chord to chord, a la ramones, and the most basic rock songs employ TWO chords only. trhink of some of the more basic misfits tunes.

more complex songs have a "bridge" between chords, a sequence of notes that gets you to the new chord, creating a nice emotional change in the listener. a great bridge can serve as the HOOK in a song or it can lead into the chorus hook.

it sounds more complex than it is, but it is just terminology

help me out people!

it's not complicated at all, i just don't know how to explain it.

Chord - 3+ notes.
Chord change - moving from one set of notes to another.

The notes have different relationships to each other, depending on their frequency. Certain frequencies are considered 'dissonant', others 'consonant'. Some chords have consonant relationships with others; some have dissonant relationships with each other.

Obviously, Wiki will come to the rescue

Hey musical people, can someone explain to me what exactly an octave is?

does it rly have to be at least 3 notes?

i do this out of laziness:
e|-x
B|-x
G|-x
D|-x
A|-3
E|-1

instead of this:

e|-x
B|-x
G|-x
D|-3
A|-3
E|-1



are you serious

Powerchords aren't technically proper chords.

Octave - sing Doh reh me fa so la te doh. The two 'doh's have a ratio of 1/2. That's an octave.

fuck technicalities.

i do what i want.

The first isn't a 'real' chord but can have a chordal/ modal/ melodic relationship to the rest of the song - in that instance, you'd have the major tritone if the bass were playing a B (the seventh note of the scale of F) or the B string was fretted at 2, which is A, the third note necessary for a 5th chord (F5)

The second is not really a chord in and of itself either, as the F on the D string is an octave of the F on the E string (that is, there's two of the same note). This isn't a hard and fast rule, but a generally accepted convention of chord construction.

no they are not

This is good, and right. Except when people make shit music, which is the majority of people. But not you. So, uh... well done.

pythagoras, that magical genius of greece, figured out that if you take a lute's string, for instance, and pluck it, and it resonates at a C for instance, if you cut the string in half, it also resonates at a C but at a higher pitch. if you double the length of that string, it is a C but at a lower pitch.

the "octave" is the space betwee those pitches, and is composed of 8 (octo) notes.

do -re-mi-fah-so-lah-ti- and back to DOH

it is a physical result of how nature is constructed, and when pythagoras found this out he went apeshit thinking the entire universe was composed of music, the music of the spheres. it appears to be an underlying order of nature.

a note at 400 hertx doubled, is 800 hertz, and an octave higher. One at 200 hertz is an octave lower.

Glice - a quick question: In relation to the F (major) scale, isn't B the flatted fifth? And if you fret the B string at 2, would you not get C sharp?

sometimes you get B double sharp or C double flat

weird!

man, playing cello learns ya somethin'

Actually, I may have written a load of cock there

1 F
2 G
3 A
4 Bb
5 C
6 D
7 E
8 F

So the third "missing" note in the F tritone is A, which can be got at by fretting the G string at the 2nd fret. Of course!

I meant G string at 2, which is A, the third. The Bb is the fourth in the major scale... flattened fifths would require the fourth to be somewhere else, a semitone lower. A flattened fifth would be a B though, or a Cb, but that's unecessarily confusing.

I love th Blues

everything is flatted fifths.

what they said.
i think the main reason that the jimmy o song is s reminiscent is the piano drum ratio, they way they work together and then with the sax. the drumming, from what i remember and i dont feel like hearing the song now, is very pink floydish...

you could not be more awkward if you tried.

Trite answer a) - If by 'awkward' you mean 'cunt', then yes, I agree.
Trite answer b) - Awkwarrd? I haven't even got started yet sweetcheeks.
Trite answer c) - Aww, bless you.
Trite answer d) - You sound like my mother

Or you could pick exciting mystery answer e) - the choice, my dear, is yours!

cunt.

vitriol.

what happened to all the fanny rubbing and crotch nasty?

anyone bumping pork rinds around here?

aaaah... RESONATE!. i get why the name now.

ok i knew chords i guess i just didn't know-- in the guitar say...

awesome explanation man, thank you.

thanks to all of you who did too


yes but what is the reminiscence based on? you know what i mean? i experience the psychological phenomenon "this shit reminds me of that". yet what is the shit itself that i'm perceiving?

the piano is like playing the same notes right? or the same distance between the notes? or... ??

I believe what would be considered the same about these songs is called the "key" or the "scale". they are harmonized together through the notes along the melody that they share in common, though not enough exactly to be the identical song. Further, Jim used the same tempo, and a very similar progression [ie, the succession of notes played either in chord or melody format], the drum beat is nearly identical as well.

my vote:

the tempo/timing/progression/harmony/melody/scale/key/and drum beat are at times identical and others nearly identical enough to be the same song..

once it gets to the drum part to can actually sync the songs up together perfectly and not even notice a difference, they in this way compliment each other, which is what I feel Jim was going for, it sounds like Jim took the base from the Floyd tune, and added upon it the sounds and effects he would have liked to hear with it.

I think it's just in the same key. It uses a few of the same chords, (naturally, since a key is a set of chords/notes) and the rhythm of the songs are very similar. Kind of like dun...dun...dun...dundundun. Also, at about 2 min in Jim's it does a similar change in dynamics (volume/intensity).

It doesn't take much for songs to sound similar, just like a similarly-shaped chin and nose can make two people look "alike".

interesting point

chin + nose will make people look like relatives yo. it's not an accident.

pink o'rourke who?

An octave is the distance between two notes, as separated by eight notes. To move "up" an octave is to double the frequency of a note; to move "down" an octave is to cut the frequency in half.

When someone is singing and they hop up to falsetto without changing keys, they're moving up an octave... Because he is doubling the original note's frequency, he's moving to what amounts to a higher version of the same note and he doesn't need the rest of the band to change notes with him. They can stay at the original place on the scale.

Basically octaves are just markers on the scale. 8 notes up or down and you're finding your starting note again, in a "higher" or "lower" form.

[Jim O'Rourke On Eureka's pop culture and musical influences, 1999]
"Like Ken Vandermark’s sax solo on "Through the Night Softly." If you take that out of context, you’re going to be wondering, "What is that?". I remember recording it and saying "No, Ken, stupider…stupider." He kept saying, "Aw Jim, come on." But what most people have heard is Pink Floyd’s "The Great Gig in the Sky" from Dark Side of the Moon, which I can understand because the drumming was purposefully supposed to sound like Nick Mason. But it is supposed to feel like "Saturday Night Live." That interests me partially because it’s a cultural reference taken out of its context but also because it’s just stupid. I like stupid stuff. I have to admit it’s also slightly a parody of a Gastr del Sol song for me. The cliched poignant piano on that song is just ridiculous. What is so poignant about a piano humping out a bunch of chords, you know? So that tune is mostly made up of jokes. But it had to work musically of course."

- Jim O'Rourke
---

I just played the two songs alongside one another. Obviously "Great Gig", the meter is slightly different, and chief similarity is in the piano chords and the drumming, and how they fit together. Also in he climax, with the soul singin' and saxophone being pretty comparable, as both act as the climax of the song....

But I think this is Jim both paying tribute to, and having a laugh at, the "poignant" and melancholy style of epic '70s rock.

So both songs are in the same key, and riff on the same basic chord progression, so they're rooted in the same series of notes. But Eureka is not meant to be taken as seriously as I often find myself taking it. That line about "no, Kim- stupider" is pretty telling. Insignificance and Eureka were both meant to be a little dumb. I know he says he's poking fun at Gastr Del Sol, but by splicing SNL and Pink Floyd, I think he's being a cheeky fuck and making a very blank-faced statement about how "stupid" trad rock music can be.

That's not to say he doesn't like Floyd. I'm sure he does. But this is Jim O'Rourke. It's a tongue in cheek tribute, if you ask me, and Eureka is a tongue in cheek album.