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... Or you can just layer a distorted closed hi hat on your kick and turn it down until you can just about feel it...

Same thing, but you get to keep the original kick without pitching it down (and therefore buggering up the energy of it)

manray wrote: Well said. I'm well aware of the interplay between maths and the underlying nature of music but like you say, maths rarely serves you, rather it is used to understand WHY.

It depends on how you look at things really. I know for a fact I'm not particularly artistic, my mind is more geared towards tangible concepts rather than intangible interpretations of things.

As such, approaching things from a mathematical (in this sense at least) base gives me a slightly better understanding about things. That being said, my missus is a shit hot artist (Art degree and all that), and the way she approaches things seems fucking alien to me, same way that my nerdy approach isn't her cup of tea.

manray wrote:

james fox wrote:musical scales and notes and frequencies are mathematical in nature. this is a fact. at no point did i say you should sit there working out basslines with a calculator, just that i reckon you need to have a bit of technical knowhow to back up your ears if you want to get ahead of the pack.

Yes but like almost everything the mathematics is secondary. In this case the music came first and the mathematics was then later used to understand the relationships, logic, patterns etc.. after.

Saying "music is maths" is just dumbness.

The ears come first my friend. You can learn all the maths you want but it will never tell you anything about music. Maybe you should stop getting confused between maths and music theory because they are two different things.

i think you have completely missed my point here. the maths thing was a throwaway line, and a veiled reference to boards of canada - although what i said does still stand, you need one to have the other. i don't actually give a shit about maths and its relationship to music, i killed the part of my brain that can handle numbers a long time ago...

i think macc has said it best, so i'll leave this thread now and possibly return later on whilst enjoying a jazz cigarette.

Serox wrote:I know that back in the 90s people were making quality music without using maths.

If they can do it without the help of Einstein than why can't we?

it was the same in the 90's m8, and has been ever since the first humans picked up sticks and started making beats on fallen down trees.


regularity and even numbers and stuff is what makes us feel the flow and rythm in music, if you put in something irregular in it you get a drop.
and if your only using irregular numbers , sure maybe you can get something you can lissten to, but you sure as hell cant dance to it.


music is math, thats is a fact, but do you need to be aware of that and know math to make music? nahhh not really.

i suck at math and completly failed at it in school by the way.

edit : wow im typing slow and this thread is moving fast.
some good points have been made while i was writing this, like macc's post.

I always make sure my kick is hitting around 100hz, and trim off the sub bass from it (around 20-30 hz) This is common practice in the world of DnB, and the snare ideally should be around 200hz. Try it, you might be surprised!

Oblivious wrote:

Serox wrote:I know that back in the 90s people were making quality music without using maths.

If they can do it without the help of Einstein than why can't we?

it was the same in the 90's m8, and has been ever since the first humans picked up sticks and started making beats on fallen down trees.


regularity and even numbers and stuff is what makes us feel the flow and rythm in music, if you put in something irregular in it you get a drop.
and if your only using irregular numbers , sure maybe you can get something you can lissten to, but you sure as hell cant dance to it.


music is math, thats is a fact, but do you need to be aware of that and know math to make music? nahhh not really.

i suck at math and completly failed at it in school by the way.

edit : wow im typing slow and this thread is moving fast.
some good points have been made while i was writing this, like macc's post.

I think they were using there ears and not really paying attention to any maths tbh.

manray wrote:

james fox wrote:music is maths, after all...

Hahahahah ahahah ahahha ahahah ahahahah ahah.

That's the extreme levels of dumbness right there. Sure you can use maths at some level to analyse and describe almost everything in the universe but that doesn't make math especially useful in creative areas such as music and art etc...

I'll stick to making music without the calculator.

That's the extreme levels of dumbness right there.

you said it budy.

music is maths. its all just numbers when making music. whether you know it or not.

Serox wrote:

Oblivious wrote:

Serox wrote:I know that back in the 90s people were making quality music without using maths.

If they can do it without the help of Einstein than why can't we?

it was the same in the 90's m8, and has been ever since the first humans picked up sticks and started making beats on fallen down trees.


regularity and even numbers and stuff is what makes us feel the flow and rythm in music, if you put in something irregular in it you get a drop.
and if your only using irregular numbers , sure maybe you can get something you can lissten to, but you sure as hell cant dance to it.


music is math, thats is a fact, but do you need to be aware of that and know math to make music? nahhh not really.

i suck at math and completly failed at it in school by the way.

edit : wow im typing slow and this thread is moving fast.
some good points have been made while i was writing this, like macc's post.

I think they were using there ears and not really paying attention to any maths tbh.

yea ofcourse m8, that was not the point i was trying to make,
my point was that i dont think music has becomed more or less mathimatical today than it was then.
the only diffrence is that we understand it better now.

and you dont need to know math to make music, but if you want to you can, since its the fundamental stones wich music is built on.

Oblivious wrote: i dont think music has becomed more or less mathimatical today than it was then.
the only diffrence is that we understand it better now.

Judging by many of the posts I read on this and other forums, I would have to disagree with the last bit... :semiteef:

"mathy" experiments can lead to totally enjoyable pieces of music

NoSpin wrote:"mathy" experiments can lead to totally enjoyable pieces of music

Certainly I've done some pretty good stuff while trying to avoid working on my PhD...

NoSpin wrote:"mathy" experiments can lead to totally enjoyable pieces of music

Key word here; 'experiments'.

Not formula


Still....prog dubstep anyone?

278 hours long?

i take it all the 'music is nothing to do with maths' crew have never used a 3/4 polyrhythm then, or wouldn't know their minor 7th from their minor 9th?

obviously you don't need to know what a minor 7th is to use one in your track. but it might help you work with it.

You don't really have to know anything about maths to have your music theory on lock down. So saying music is maths is like saying chocolate is maths. Yes if you want to break it down you can find the maths and use it but that's underneath everything.

manray wrote:You don't really have to know anything about maths to have your music theory on lock down. So saying music is maths is like saying chocolate is maths. Yes if you want to break it down you can find the maths and use it but that's underneath everything.

cute, but wrong. it's already been touched on that scales and chords are mathematical relationships... fine, you can easily make a case that not knowing a thing about those relationships (that a tone an octave above is exactly 2x the frequency, or that the A3 is 440hz and thus A4 is 880hz), but rhythm is mathematics. ONLY mathmatics.

it doesn't have to be supercomplicated mathmatics, but even something that you always hear, say a 3/4 pattern (think 'left leg out' or the claps in "swing dat skirt") is a fraction. double the speed and it's 6/8, or put it at 16th notes and its 12/16.

indian classical is the best example i can think of... you build a cadence of one pattern, repeated 3 times, with spaces in between each, and the last note lands on the 65th beat. in those 3 you have to acknowledge the theme of the piece... go! if you don't understand the math behind it, and what the math SOUNDS like, then yr SOL. granted it's an extreme example, but there's absolutely no way you can say that rhythm isn't based in math and isn't important. you pull up yr DAW and all you see is a subdivided grid!

w/o the numeric relationships behind the music, you'd be left with a bunch of unorganized noise. it's the math, like it or not, that gives structure and lets emotion actually exist in the music.

people are created diffrent to, for some the mathematical structure of music is very obvious, some can experience music in geomtrical forms that has mass and volume, some can se it in motion and velocity, others in light and colours, for some its just abstract.

take Beethoven for example, thats a guy who had the abillity to automaticly visualize the mathematical structure of music, and his 9th symphony he could compose when completly deaf.

lol @ octave =13 steps.

Oblivious wrote:
regularity and even numbers and stuff is what makes us feel the flow and rythm in music, if you put in something irregular in it you get a drop.
and if your only using irregular numbers , sure maybe you can get something you can lissten to, but you sure as hell cant dance to it.

there's plenty of indigenous dance musics with crazy time signatures like 9/8 and what not ...