so, i get on the elevator with one of you humans. i push my button, and step back to wait, lost in thought, the precise nature of which is unimportant. and then...

"oh mi gawd, i'm so sorry, i pressed the wrong button. i hit 6. i meant 9. i'm sorry."

"it's ok. it's not a big deal. i don't care."

"it is. i'm sorry."

so, i says...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iaJWrLsJlI

 

jimi was dead over a decade before i was born, and this has always bothered me. the way i imagine it is that he trilled off into the galaxy in a beam of fluorescent light, to return to us one day as pure energy.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lcl2l0XXV8

well, the night I was born
lord I swear the moon turned a fire red
the night I was born
i swear the moon turned a fire red
well my poor mother cried out "lord, the gypsy was right!"
and I seen her, fell down right dead
(have mercy)

nobody'll notice. the audience doesn't know that even exists. now, if you'll excuse me, i have me some jimi to listen to...

you lost me at the zeppelin riff. even if it was probably a zappa riff....

lots of tapping, not much development.

dude, it takes some gall to play through a ring modulator in much of any context. this context? tremendous gall.

this is really some kind of jazzy interpretation of the nutcracker, which has been ported to classical guitar at least twice. can't say it's uninteresting, though, even if it isn't quite what it claims to be....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI_cU9-3hDk

great guitar tone - i mean in relation to the orchestral music. but, as is so often the case when people try to do this, the orchestral component is pretty weak. it's not orchestral music for guitar, it's a type of progressive rock informed primarily by pink floyd and speilberg films....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-37eYk0wrIs

anachronistic and features very wooden playing from everybody involved.

but i'll at least give him credit for actually writing a guitar concerto that is both a concerto and for guitar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PX-SEjn2bI

 

deathtokoalas
generic symphonic work for violin transposed for guitar.

*yawn*.

he didn't even get the second & third octave range stuff up and out of the way for it.

i'd give him a D.

deathtokoalas
i'm confused. i was looking for renditions of bad religion and minor threat songs. da fuck is this?

actually, this sounds more interesting than your average guitar concerto - more in the style of keneally. guitars are sure mixed up front, though.......

Oneness100
He just puts a couple of microphones in one place where the conductor would be standing. That's how Chesky does all of his recordings. So, if the guitars are louder in the room to the microphones, then that's how they are capturing it. They don't use tons of tracks or overdubs. It's all live performance with two microphones in one position and that's it.

Cheeky's into atonal music. I think so far, I think this isn't something that great.

deathtokoalas
branca had a guitar orchestra in the 70s. nice try.

ChannelName
Branca's guitar "orchestra" created an appalling cacophonous din. Of course some tools are willing to pretend that's music.

deathtokoalas
i'd argue his work is mixed - some of it's brilliant, some of it's pointless. but, that's not the point.

ChannelName
I think the term "orchestra" should be reserved for a highly-skilled group of musicians working together, cooperatively, as a team, for example, Sinfonity.

Everything I've heard by Branca is just a bunch of undisciplined guitarists making a simultaneous racket. But it's boring, offensive, and mediocre, so it gets legitimized as art.

deathtokoalas
i don't know where to start with that.

first, it's not a very informed concept of an orchestra, which often includes prominent roles for solo musicians. somebody sitting in orchestra isn't really demonstrating teamwork because they're trained to completely ignore each other and focus on the score. the only kind of communication that occurs is between the players and the conductor, who mostly just keeps time. a traditional orchestra is consequently better thought of more like a machine, with parts that work independently to produce a final product.

second, that clip up there isn't particularly impressive, unless you think there's something of value in working malmsteen solos into centuries old bach cantatas. as wrong as the idea of teamwork is in an orchestral context, you speak of it in the context of music that seems to sacrifice any kind of development in favour of flashy solo work.

third, branca's work is often atonal or rhythmically abstract, but it rarely lacks development or conceptual frameworks. it's ok if you don't like it, but you should try not to be inaccurate about it.

i used branca as an example because he's widely acknowledged as doing it first, but there's no deficit of orchestral guitar work after 1980 to draw on. the claim that this is novel on that level is blatantly outright false and should be retracted.

(pause)

deathtokoalas
actually, i just watched that again and it seems like sinfonity is all about playing existing pieces. no original works. i should back off from the no development claim, because there's nothing creative being done. that's not even art, it's just commodifying classical music...

but, regarding branca, give this a watch:

you don't have to like it, but you can clearly see that the guitarists all have scores in front of them and are being conducted. it's modern music, sure. not everybody likes modern music. but to deny it's orchestral is just idiotic.

i realize this is trying to be something a little bit different, but a concerto is supposed to have a lead instrument.

this should have been called "different trains crashing into each other".

jam band concerto in e pentatonic?

it's a difficult concept from the start, and taking untrained blues musicians and plugging them into an orchestra generally sounds like what it is - not just with the guitars, but with the orchestrations, which are invariably cliched. successes are few and far between.