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To be completely honest and sincere I think Vai is an all time great musician. I’ve never even been like #1 Vai fanboy or anything but the deeper you dig into his body of the work the more you realize he’s obsessed with music and playing around with it on the purest level. For what it’s worth I feel just about the same about Zappa but I’ve listened to far more of him than Vai.
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Sep 2, 2019 07:22
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A day and a half late to Berklee chat but what the hell. I went to Berklee for my first semester of college after I graduated high school in 1999 and it is totally worthy of the jokes in the good and bad ways. It is super cool being dropped into a bucket with a poo poo-ton of skilled musicians from all around the world and access to great facilities. Steve Vai's neighbor, who had been getting lessons from him before she came to Berklee, was in the dorm room next to me. I thought it was an empty boast until Vai did a concert at Tower Records, first Wednesday of the semester, and she was hanging out with him like old friends before and after his performance. It was a crazy mixing pot. That said, for me, it also told me that I didn't have what I needed to be a professional musician within the first two months, so that saved me a lot of money since, even in 1999, Berklee was $30k a year. So the joke: Why has no one who graduated from Berklee ever made anything good? Because the people who stuck around for all four years usually weren't networking and/or good enough to get grabbed for major gigs well before the four years were up. There are always exceptions but really it's all about the attitudes that people were coming to the school with. Since it is an accredited four year school, a lot of people come with the mindset of "I need to get the degree" or "I need to check off the list of classes" since that's what everyone had beaten into their head from high school and it can get in the way of the music. Another problem is that since Berklee is not a normal music college, it does not require people to be able to read music coming in. Well, it didn't in 1999, that may have changed in 20 years. As a result, you'll have lots of people who are intuitively musically talented who need to be remedially trained in music notation. When you then take them into theory, since it's something else that they didn't have exposure to, there are a lot who seem to take the theory as prescriptive as the notation that they now have to pay attention to. (I took a few years of music theory from one of the state colleges as dual enrollment classes while I was in high school, so my Berklee theory teachers used me as a teaching assistant instead of a normal student since they needed all the help they could get with the vocalists in our class) Yet another reason is that a lot of the stereotypical musical snobbery exists at Berklee, not so much with the staff but definitely with the students. Jazz uber alles. "Hey man, did you hear about the computer some guys made at MIT this summer to write bop solos? It's alright but it's no Parker man, but nothing's Parker. Bird forever, man!" (actual quote from a dude I met my second night at the school) After Jazz, Blues and Blues-influenced styles have the respect. Then rock/metal at the bottom of everything, partially because so much of the school was guitarists riding high on 90s Dream Theater and Steve Vai worship (I'll admit, that's why I went there when I was 18) but also because the people there for rock/metal were just dorkier than the Jazz folks. As a result, the rock and metal guys develop absurd inferiority complexes and try to be super complex to try and make up for being "stupid rock guys". And it hits hard from the first minute you're there. On the day we were doing our classification/placement performances, I decided not to play Marty Friedman's Dragon Mistress (what I'd been practicing all summer) and instead played a jazz standard (I don't even remember which, at this point) to try and look better for the jury. Instead I fumbled it so badly, between nerves and not being a competent jazz player, that I ended up in guitar classes and ensembles for the "we're not sure why they were accepted, but they're here and now we have to teach them" students. So yeah, any other Berklee questions? I'll be glad to give you two decade old answers!
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Sep 2, 2019 15:31
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I still can’t wrap my mind around Tom Morello somehow not even going to Berklee in spirit. I must’ve just thought “wow that guy is a huge guitar dork and we all know what that means (it’s Berklee)”
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Sep 2, 2019 15:53
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Hey, if watching and listening (and also practicing like madmen) was good enough to turn Eddie Van Halen into a bad motherfucker with the 6-strings, it's good enough for Tom Morello.
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Sep 2, 2019 16:03
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Waldstein Sonata posted:A day and a half late to Berklee chat but what the hell.
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Sep 2, 2019 16:15
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Wark Say posted:Hey, if watching and listening (and also practicing like madmen) was good enough to turn Eddie Van Halen into a bad motherfucker with the 6-strings, it's good enough for Tom Morello. Wasn't Tom Morello also actually classically trained on some other stringed instrument? I want to say that's how he ended up meeting Adam Jones in high school, which I read like a decade ago in Guitar World.
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Sep 2, 2019 18:19
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They used to be classmates and bandmates in high school (they're from the same suburb of Chi-city). The one who's a classically-trained violinist is Jones who, like yours truly (except for Viola, in my case), learned via an adaptation of the Suzuki Method. (Source: As mentioned in the Metal Thread from NMD, from 1997 when I discovered them up until around 2002, I was a massive Tool dork)
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Sep 2, 2019 18:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWRfLuJ_NKw
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Sep 2, 2019 19:00
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Having intense nostalgia about being 16 and wanting to go to Berkelee so loving bad so I could become John Petrucci even though I’ve had zero interest in college of any sort other than that lol. Not even a cringe nostalgia or anything, that was a great era and I’m glad I got so into the music nerd stuff in those days. I love it. Never made it to Berklee but getting into that “hey we can really get deep into this whole music thing!” is something that formed my entire existence and has fueled me since.
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Sep 2, 2019 19:04
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Kilometers Davis posted:Having intense nostalgia about being 16 and wanting to go to Berkelee so loving bad so I could become John Petrucci even though I’ve had zero interest in college of any sort other than that lol. could be worse, i wanted to go to full sail 
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Sep 2, 2019 19:10
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I got a boring, non-music degree from a school with a very good jazz program, and the amount of stress, anxiety and cutthroat-ness you could feel radiating from all those students turned me off the whole thing. I imagine it's ten times worse at Berklee or Julliard. Also they put most of the music freshmen in the same dorm, so imagine twenty different jazz trumpet lines being practiced simultaneously, 24/7.
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Sep 2, 2019 19:19
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Dewgy posted:could be worse, i wanted to go to full sail That was actually my second choice at the time!
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Sep 2, 2019 19:24
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Isn’t Berklee just a series of classes that prepare you for being homeless and in between you practice your instrument?
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Sep 2, 2019 19:26
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Dang It Bhabhi! posted:Isn’t Berklee just a series of classes that prepare you for being homeless and in between you practice your instrument? Good thing I avoided tha
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Sep 2, 2019 19:31
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Dewgy posted:could be worse, i wanted to go to full sail
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Sep 2, 2019 19:32
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I feel like some of this might be relevant to the topic at hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFYBVGdB7MU
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Sep 2, 2019 21:53
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SaintFu posted:I feel like some of this might be relevant to the topic at hand: I almost made it ten minutes. Almost. There was still 20 left.
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Sep 2, 2019 22:43
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Dang It Bhabhi! posted:Isn’t Berklee just a series of classes that prepare you for being homeless and in between you practice your instrument? yeah but they have their own special way of teaching the relationship between scales and chords compared to regular music schools that are also just a series of classes that prepare you for homelessness
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Sep 2, 2019 23:01
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Wait wait we’re not bad talking Adam Neely itt right??? He’s pure of heart and a good music boy.
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Sep 2, 2019 23:24
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I have a friend of mine that did a bachelors & masters in sound engineering at Berklee. He ended up moving back home after he was done, but fwiw he seems to make more money as a freelance "guy with a bedroom studio" than the average person doing it.
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Sep 2, 2019 23:39
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My experience was the off brand western prairie Canadian version of Berkelee and frankly it tracks pretty similarly just without near as much prestige. My school was mostly a depot for Canadians who wanted to prep before going to Berklee or LIPA and to save thousands by not doing all your schooling outside of Canada. Just recently they got a degree program which is nice but still talking to other grads it’s usually “Yeah just graduated, no idea what I’m doing now” e: Like seriously I have a degree in Jazz and Contemporary Popular Music - Composition and went back to working at a music store, as did other grads I know. Weird BIAS fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 23:42
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Kilometers Davis posted:To be completely honest and sincere I think Vai is an all time great musician. I’ve never even been like #1 Vai fanboy or anything but the deeper you dig into his body of the work the more you realize he’s obsessed with music and playing around with it on the purest level. For what it’s worth I feel just about the same about Zappa but I’ve listened to far more of him than Vai. Same. Vai is just a giant guitar nerd who happened to strike it big.
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Sep 2, 2019 23:55
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Dang It Bhabhi! posted:Isn’t Berklee just a series of classes that prepare you for being homeless and in between you practice your instrument? To be fair, most colleges don't prepare you to be homeless.
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Sep 3, 2019 00:01
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Weird BIAS posted:My experience was the off brand western prairie Canadian version of Berkelee and frankly it tracks pretty similarly just without near as much prestige. My school was mostly a depot for Canadians who wanted to prep before going to Berklee or LIPA and to save thousands by not doing all your schooling outside of Canada. Just recently they got a degree program which is nice but still talking to other grads it’s usually “Yeah just graduated, no idea what I’m doing now” Grant MacEwan?
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Sep 3, 2019 00:19
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Yeah.
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Sep 3, 2019 00:23
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Weird BIAS posted:Yeah. That's in the big orange building right? I went to Grant Mac for a semester before transferring to the U of A and then to another university out of province. I dated somebody in the communications program back then, and got to see the classrooms full of people playing guitar. It looked like a lot of fun.
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Sep 3, 2019 01:02
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They just moved to a new building in 2017-2018 for the music program but yeah it was the orange bulding for years. I did the diploma in 07-09 and the degree in 16-18. It's a pretty fun program with a lot of good people just a degree is not a replacement for networking and Edmonton is kind of a saturated market for musicians.
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Sep 3, 2019 01:21
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Kilometers Davis posted:Wait wait we’re not bad talking Adam Neely itt right??? He’s pure of heart and a good music boy. Adam Neely gets a pass for identifying and working in the flaws in his music education. And Sungazer loving rules.
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Sep 3, 2019 01:37
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The first Berklee grads that came to my mind were the Dream Theater guys (yes, I know they didn't graduate) and I was going to say that I thought their first couple of albums were decent, but you could very easily argue that the reason for that was Kevin Moore, considering how poo poo so much of DT stuff was after he left.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:24
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Kevin Moore was also on the best albums Fates Warning ever did so yeah, probably not a coincidence. Apparently the secret to good prog metal is to have a guy in your band who's really into Depeche Mode.
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Sep 3, 2019 09:42
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OutOfPrint posted:Adam Neely gets a pass for identifying and working in the flaws in his music education. Neely's music usually doesn't do much for me but I absolutely love his Youtubes.
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Sep 3, 2019 13:00
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The Muppets On PCP posted:it's kinda funny given a lot of people think the end of glam happened right at 11:59pm december 31, 1989 when the truth is and i know you also remember most of those bands hung on and still did well enough for like 3-4 more years. it was odd that they did have their legs cut out from under them by the bigger labels, mtv, and radio (to an extent) right when their audience who were mostly teenagers in the mid-80s were now old enough to have even more disposable income. for the bands that didn't break up their popularity as touring acts toward the end of the 90s bears that out It would be a fun retrospective to look at all the attempts of hair metal to survive the grunge era; I remember a few of them vanishing for a year or two and then trying to make a return (often not so successfully) but yeah, stuff lingered for a while. Also power ballads (More than words, To be with you, Winds of change) seemed to survive musical changes better. The real beginning of the 90's era of music was May 25th, 1991, when Billboard went to Soundscan and all the pop artists that the labels swore were selling millions of records had to actually, well, sell records to show up on the chart. Also, Soundscan was initially mostly based on west coast record sales, causing some disproportionate sales from locations like Seattle which may have had a small influence as well.
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Sep 3, 2019 15:56
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The weakest attempts were imo the ones that tried to emulate what was popular. Of course, that only applies to the ones that didn't implode around or before '91 (Dokken and Ratt come to mind).
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Sep 3, 2019 16:26
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Lester Shy posted:I got a boring, non-music degree from a school with a very good jazz program, and the amount of stress, anxiety and cutthroat-ness you could feel radiating from all those students turned me off the whole thing. I imagine it's ten times worse at Berklee or Julliard. I went to a community college before attempting a 4 year, subsequently found music there and decided I wanted to be a music major (prior to that I had no experience playing an instrument or anything about music outside of listening to it). After a bit they noticed I was good enough to try out for a special music program they had that preps students for music focused 4 years so I said gently caress it and went in. Amount of burnout among the students was loving palpable and I didn't fare any better because I'm a complete waste when it comes to being a good academic. After two semesters of doing this program I subsequently dropped out of college and never thought about going back because music stopped being fun and became a painful chore. I even stopped playing cold turkey because it sucked so much, then later started to get more serious about my electric guitar playing. I can't imagine the poo poo that four year college students deal with and I'm sure as poo poo if I dealt with it I'd off myself in short work. At least I don't have any student debt to pay off!
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Sep 3, 2019 17:27
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Sep 3, 2019 21:35
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Needs another string.
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Sep 3, 2019 21:50
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I'm just curious how you get the proper string tension on something like that without tuning knobs/pegs.
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Sep 3, 2019 22:07
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They don't use standard strings, you need ones with balls at both ends.
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Sep 3, 2019 22:16
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rickiep00h posted:I'm just curious how you get the proper string tension on something like that without tuning knobs/pegs. It's like a Steinberger, at the bridge the knobs pull one end of the string as you tighten it. edit: Chalupa Joe posted:They don't use standard strings, you need ones with balls at both ends. Actually, that Agile is using standard strings, the top part of the neck fastens the strings down with a tightening nut.
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Sep 3, 2019 22:20
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I'm surprised it's not multiscale, I guess that's coming later.
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Sep 3, 2019 22:30
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