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Music degrees (pg. 3)
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
theres nothing complicated about music. try study thermodynamics, heattransfer and fluidmechanics instead. thats what im doing atm. |
You're talkin' to an electrical engineer/systems designer here bro, your l33t science razzamatazz won't work on me.
But while we're on the subject, science and engineering is another highly creative field, at least for some; think about how much sense it would make for someone to eschew formal learning of, well let's say thermodynamics, on account of it being a bunch of unnecessary conservative "rules" or "laws", which presumably would only serve to hinder one's efforts toward building a free-energy device.
I really don't want to start another argument about this nonsense, but there's always something complicated about everything. It's a fact of life. Whenever you catch somebody saying that "it's easy", it usually means that they find it easy because they've never attempted to do anything beyond the mundane and are in fact so ignorant of the depth of the subject that they don't even realize that the subject has any depth.
I could just as well say that there's nothing difficult about, for example, biking. And there isn't, if you define the term as merely riding on a lightly-traveled paved road from point A to a point B about 5-10 minutes away. Racing, mountain biking, dirt biking, or bike marathons, on the other hand, are all subsets of the same activity but far more involved, with all kinds of special training and gear.
Music production is effectively like that. There's nothing difficult about throwing together some samples and melody riffs in a mostly trial-and-error process, copying whatever formulas are most commonly used by other producers. But that's hardly all there is to the subject.
The first obstacle to learning is always obliviousness. If you find yourself unwilling or unable to get past that, it's not something you should brag about. |
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| msz |
| hex, distinctive records? |
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| SoundMagus |
| +1 DigiNut well said sir :) |
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| hexadecimal |
| quote: | Originally posted by msz
hex, distinctive records? |
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| Sonic_c |
Im doing Popular Music Studies at degree my course is
1)Production
2)Music History
3)Compostion / Theory
4)Songwriting
5)Music industry
6)Contextual Studies
7)Live sound
8)Ableton Live module
I love it apart from being in proper music studios and getting to do trance sets on 20k soundsystems you also have to do academic research into sexism and racism or anything really in music.
One day i am studying the red hot chilli peppers lyrics next im learning New york (parallel) compression in a proper studio on protools the next im presenting a seminal essay on how women are degraded through popular music. +1 from me never had a better experience |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
^ Sounds like you might want to skip (3) as well:
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
i dont want my mind to be polluted by some conservative old music-teacher telling me about rules of chord-progressions, syncope- and stuff etc etc, so no, i have no degree. |
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| wrzonance |
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
The last thing I'll add is that, of the few music classmates that I kept in touch with over the years and my numerous bandmates that were also music majors, as far as I know, none of them are working in the music industry (aside from one or two who work at music stores part-time for the discounts). So, hopefully, that doesn't sound too discouraging, but again, I stress that my experience is probably much different than what a college freshman would be facing today.] |
It's all about goals isn't it then? And drive. But most importantly, luck.
Unlike you, I went the "technical" route. Much to my dismay (more on that later). I went to the Art Institute of Seattle for "Audio Production"
It was an interesting program, but it only earned me a Associates, but a lot of debt, and no job. If anyone is ever consider any schooling--- go the 4 year degree route. Technical education is crap, always go for a bachelors.
Anyway, I agree. Most of the people I know do not have a job directly related to audio production. The one person who does, my buddy Vadim, works at Activision making note patterns for Guitar Hero.
The rest? Either jobs at music stores, or an entirely different career with a lot of debt. I know I am being pessimistic here. And I know it has a lot to do with personal motivation. I just don't have the same level of aggression to persue a real career in the audio industry. I also lack the talent/training, as I know squat of music theory except what I learned when I was 12-13 in piano lessons.
I know this is starting to sound like quite the ramble, but the point is here:
Your education is only as good as how aggressively you use it. I really didn't. And I regret that. As a consequence, I work at an engineering firm designing sound systems (not that glamorous) for military and school buildings.
Blah blah blah. Okay I'll shut the up now. |
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| wrzonance |
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
some people just cant read between the lines. i should start using :p more, maybe people gets it then. |
Huh?
*drinks more wine* |
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| wrzonance |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
You're talkin' to an electrical engineer/systems designer here bro, your l33t science razzamatazz won't work on me.
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That's what I do (minus the EE part, I learned low-voltage systems design on the job... when you're a consultant, it isn't that complicated, specifying systems is relatively simple. don't ask me to build a circuit though.). :-|
Being EE nerds must go hand-in-hand with being EDM nerds. |
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| Tom Smykowski |
I started doing bachelors degree in music production, and the teachers warned some of us ahead of time that it would start out really slow, since few had much previous experience and they wanted to make sure everybody managed to follow. And it did, painfully slow. And I never actually really learned anything either, it was more like a really slow process of being confirmed that i already did stuff the right way.
It didn't really help that we after 8 months got the message that there weren't gonna be a year 2 in Oslo either. Only option would be to move across the country to ing Bergen, and that was out of the question. |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by palm
im the same. but automation as main subject. and now im learning energi stuff to get a master, 1 year left. i cant no mather how hard i try compare my work and studies to making music at all, most of all because music cant really be measured. when it comes to music and art in general a product might be perfect for some and for others, while in engineering your product either suck or it work, its not based on opinions (well it is but not in the same way imo). if i ever start thinking that way about music i will probably loose every interest of it. that doesnt mean im not critical to what i make, far from it. im just saying that music-making shouldnt really be dificult, its more about having fun and enjoying it, rather than the end-product imo. |
Your mistake isn't in believing that music is subjective and can't be measured, it's in believing that engineering is.
I can understand why you think the way you do. In school you have the luxury of right-or-wrong/works-or-not solutions because the problems have been carefully crafted to simply test your knowledge of the theory. Out in the industry, most of that work is done by computers anyway, design becomes intertwined with implementation, and you deal with a mess of financial and technical trade-offs, common (and not-so-common) practices, unrealistic expectations and timelines, incontestable management decisions, and a host of other factors that turn what you probably still view as a straightforward process into something that is truly more of an art than anything else.
In the real world things don't simply work or not work. They work but only under certain conditions, outside of which they work partially or not at all. And a product can work but still have poor usability or aesthetic appeal, which affects and is affected by the technical design a great deal more than people think. Did Apple make the right decision to have a non-replaceable battery on the iPod? To most engineers that's an idiotic idea but it seems to have worked for them.
And in engineering there are hobbyists and pretenders too. Off-shore code-sweatshop workers (and their domestic equivalents) hacking together copypasta from Google and CodeProject without the slightest clue as to what any of it is for, only that somebody said it does "A" and if they start randomly changing things they might be able to get it to do "B". If that doesn't sound like your average Fruity n00bs producer, I don't know what does.
On the larger scale you have projects like Desktop Linux and OpenOffice, made by well-meaning folks who are extremely technically proficient but have no sense of the, well, artistry behind it, and end up producing what feels like unusable garbage even though it may "work" perfectly fine or even better than commercial alternatives. Again - sound familiar to you?
I only wish that engineering were as black-and-white as you describe. But the definition of "works" is variable - there are issues of speed, cost, fit and finish, ease of use, scalability, compatibility, maintenance, versatility/configurability, and more, and not all of these things can be measured. They are different from musical judgments, to be sure, but no less subjective than concepts of mood, energy, funk, sex, you get the idea.
You learn these things about engineering only when you've been exposed to the theory and practice. You learn what can be measured and what can't. You learn where the theory applies and where it doesn't (answer: it depends on the project). Music is honestly not much different from the perspective of a composer.
The bottom line is that everything seems subjective when you don't understand the principles behind it. You can continue to tell us that music is too subjective to be condensed into formal theory or technique, but I think what's really going on here is that you want it to stay completely subjective in your own world and learning any formal methods might break the illusion. And that's fine, really, but just say it for what it is: A personal choice based on emotion and not an informed decision based on facts. |
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| wrzonance |
Holy Palm. I will be you about 1 year from now.
I work at an Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing consulting firm. You pretty much described it exactly as it is right now.
I HOPE I don't get burnt out, I have a wife, a child, and a house to pay for. But your own personal experience is scarily parallel.
I've been debating about going back to school. But I fear it's too late. I grew up to fast in my opinion, and this "career" I have right now doesn't suite me. It is far too stressful, and without much reward. The reward I get is a paycheck, and the weekends.
I know these are well-to-do-country/white people problems, but it's really getting me.
I often fantasize about a real-world "Fight Club" scenario. Where we bring everything back to zero and start over again.
So far this thread has been one of the best I've read in a while. I feel a brotherhood of the cubicle engineer coming on...
...I also feel far less special now. |
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