Pertinent Observations

Archive for the 'music' Category

27 Jul

The Classical Dead

One of the bands whose discography I have and whose music I listen to when I want to listen to “unknown music” is the Grateful Dead. And while I was listening to them last night, it sounded like it was heavily inspired by Indian classical music (especially Carnatic stuff). The song I was listening to [...]

15 May

Fixed and variable scales

One major point of difference I’ve noticed between Indian and Western classical music is about the starting point of scales. Western music has a fixed starting frequency, and all instruments and voices are supposed to be tuned to that. Every guitar is tuned identically, and I’m talking about absolute frequencies of various strings here. Similarly [...]

26 Apr

Teaching Music in Schools

How many of you actually enjoyed your “songs”/music lessons in school? Not too many, I suppose. Actually I don’t think more than a tenth of the students would have ever enjoyed these lessons. And I don’t think there is too much surprise in this given the kind of stuff that is taught in schools. At [...]

24 Apr

Unknown Music

There are times when you want to listen to songs that you don’t know. You want to listen to something that seems very vaguely familiar but something you don’t know. One way to implement this it to put winamp on randomize mode. But then, you are likely to know the songs so it won’t work [...]

25 Mar

Freestyle

Have been practising the violin for a bit of late. Maybe I’ve picked it up some 4-5 times in the last week or so. And some twelve years after I stopped formal lessons it is still a lot of fun. And as I practice I discover that I don’t find it too much fun playing [...]

28 Dec

Simplicity and improvisation

While writing my previous post on the film game, I was thinking about simplicity and improvisation. About how if you seek to improvise, in order to improvise well, you would rather choose a simple base. Like how the simplicity of film aata allows you to improvise so much and create so much fun. I was [...]

17 Mar

Fighterization of Carnatic music

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a few essays on certain extensions of the studs-and-fighters theory. For example, I had written about how after a while, every profession gets “fighterized” so as to enable a larger set of people to undertake that profession. Then, I had written about processes and about how most [...]

15 Dec

Disco Raaga – Taana – Pallavi

This is one of those posts that I’ve been intending to post for over a couple of months, but each time I think about this, I don’t happen to be in front of a computer, and even if I do, I don’t feel like writing about it. So here I am – finally blogging this. [...]

03 Oct

Need stuff

I got a new laptop last weekend. And missed out on a great opportunity on Sunday in Bombay when I met Monkee, Mukka, Madness, etc. to get stuff. Now i’m in gurgaon and don’t know how to get stuff. I basically need music and movies. Movies of all hues, in all languages (as long as [...]

02 Jul

ArthQuake

harithekid ?plays bass for this new HindRock band called Arth. They have just released their first demo. You can find both the demo songs as well as the band’s blog here. They have released three songs so far and they are all excellent, except for the vocals. Lyrics are awful as is the singing. I [...]

© 2010 Pertinent Observations | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)

GPS Reviews and news from GPS Gazettewordpress logo

Bad Behavior has blocked 158 access attempts in the last 7 days.