Beck: Classic Or Dud

it is pretty ingenious

however what if the songs suck

Beck makes a big assumption that most people can still read sheet music?

End-around On The Pirating Business.

Here’s the most brilliant part of the idea, and the part that appeals to the marketer in me. You can’t just download this album, you have to buy it. It’s not digital, it’s paper. Beck has successfully found a loophole in our digital addictions. A loophole that will find musicians and non-musicians alike wanting to purchase such a novelty, either to play the music privately, publicly, or simply to follow along while listening to the world bring the music to life. Sure, someone will probably scan the sheet music into pdfs and send them around, but my gut tells me that, since Beck isn’t recording this music himself, the only way for Beck fans to truly experience Beck within this medium is to buy the full-color, beautifully designed package in a store

I'm moderately ashamed to say that I download bootleg pdf sheetmusic all the time.

Second part of that thought being that this will be up on mediafire in short order.

Beck makes a big assumption that most people can still read sheet music?

well I dunno if he assumes "most people" - he's obviously making an assumption about his fanbase and this does limit it. fwiw I can read chord charts but sheet music eh not really (a skill I have forgotten due to lack of use)

Most musicians can't read sheet music, let alone fans.

(He would be much better off doing it in Tab tbh)

Some sheet music has the chords written, maybe even the guitar forms. If not, then EGBDF is the code breaker.

he should have released midi or Finale files, then everyone could just load their favorite plugins and bounce down the tracks.

LOL @ that slobbering article, tho. But cool for Beck. Not sure how 'fresh' and 'genius' this innovation is tho, it's pretty much the standard way things were done before recorded music, back when everybody had a piano in their house. Just swap out 'piano' with 'Garage Band'. Are there going to be specific arrangements?

I could see music teachers in high schools and colleges using this medium as a teaching platform for students.

Sheet music being used to teach students? No way...

Neat idea

LOL @ that slobbering article

yeah really. classic author bio.

I am the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle, a virtual marketing-ideas company pioneering the "Expert Sourcing" model.

the sheet music idea is pretty corny imo. no surprise it's a McSweeney's collaboration.

I absolutely love the thinking behind this idea

however I will probably never buy this

Bad article, I download tonnes of scores. I'll buy it, sure, sounds fun. I bought the Gonzales sheet music and it was a solid purchase

Bad article, I download tonnes of scores. I'll buy it, sure, sounds fun. I bought the Gonzales sheet music and it was a solid purchase

Bad article, I download tonnes of scores. I'll buy it, sure, sounds fun. I bought the Gonzales sheet music and it was a solid purchase

Bad article, I download tonnes of scores. I'll buy it, sure, sounds fun. I bought the Gonzales sheet music and it was a solid purchase

Love the idea. And yet...

The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.

...that bolded title is SO McSweeney's.

Beck makes a big assumption that most people can still read sheet music?

― Chewton Mendip (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Friday, August 10, 2012 12:29 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

p sure this isn't targeted at most people. also fwiw learning how to read sheet music when you already know how to play an instrument intuitively is like 10000000000x easier than learning how to play an unfamiliar instrument when you know how to read sheet music*. also if yr an electronic music person, then either a) being able to sight read isn't a thing, just painstakingly plot it out like u always do or b) it still isn't a thing because the way a lot music software seems to work is by mimicking the basic structure of sheet music: higher tones are higher up on the thing you're looking at, tones that come quickly one after another are closer together, or explicitly linked.

this is a cool idea, if corned up with the mcsweeney's association, but cool. i probably wont buy it but if it encourages other "popular" musicians to actually put out official sheet music/tab, then i'm down.

*nb this might just be sour grapes because i can plonk out the sequence of anything on a piano, given some sheet music, even though i haven't played regularly since i was eight---but i'll never at any point in my life be able to say "i can play the piano."

I want Orbital to put out sheet music for Wonky

I'm pretty competent with fakebook-style sheet music -- i.e., a right-hand melodic line and chord names. If it's more complicated than that, sometimes I can slowly pick it out, though at a certain point I'm simply not technically skilled to pull off moving parts with both hands.

On piano, that is.

right but you can read a fakebook

i mean the great thing about sheet music is that it makes learning/practicing go a lot more quickly. the difference between me looking at a piece of paper with instructions vs me trying to remember what i'm supposed to be doing next is getting it right the fifth time vs getting it right the 30th time

anyway figuring out sheet music is somewhere between learning how to play guitar hero and learning how to play D&D probably, harder than figuring out what to do with a checkers game, easier than emacs

my friends' band publishes the sheet music for their stuff and might very well make more money on that than on the records (but they have a big brass nerd following).

has anyone released and album only for player piano roll?

Did Conlon Nancarrow?

has anyone released and album only for player piano roll?

I think this is an April Fool's joke: http://wilcoworld.net/#!/the-whole-love-now-available-on-piano-roll/

Beck has been seriously doing work the last few years--and seemingly just for the joy of it, since it's been almost totally under the radar (with some of the best of it released for free).

Newest example, and totally incredible: a "remix" of five years of Philip Glass' oeuvre into a single 20-minute piece. Give it a shot, I doubt it's what you'd expect from either names:

http://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78

Follows on his Harry Partch tribute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5xhpIFxi7M

And the fantastically wonderful full-album cover of Skip Spence's 'Oar' he did with James Gadson, Wilco, Feist, and Jamie Lidell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Ee_69wf3w&feature=bf_prev&list=PL344D578F844FB6DF

that Harry Partch track is one my favorite things Beck's ever done. I missed getting the mp3 when it was a free download, but I'd buy it given a chance. the Glass mix is great too; gives me hope someday he'll do an entire full length album that fragmented; in most people's hands, something that changes around that much would not hold my attention but he knows how to do this

Hey DJP I fuck with Guero

If retro-fetishism did not exist we would be forced to invent it (and then sell it as super-nifty xmas presents!)

"Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form — twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of-home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case, Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012 — an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together."

http://www.songreader.net/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/beck-a-preface-to-song-reader.html

Is there no cheaper version than the one for $50?

Also noted that Jody wrote the notes?

This is a fantastic idea.

i hope there are songs with more conceptual annotations like "5 seconds of banjo sample"

I'll just go ahead and say it, at this point I like Beck post-"success" (or at least post-making-an-album-and-touring, circa 2008) than I liked him in his supposed heyday. And I quite liked 'Mellow Gold' through 'Sea Change'. But he's doing what I think an artist should do who finds wealth: doing exactly what excites his artistic capacity, not necessarily more of what makes him money. The fact that a lot of it is given away (ie "Harry Partch" or the Record Club releases solidifies my sense he's doing what he's doing for the best reasons.

Yes, but in a shop the other day, the single "Tropicalia" came on, and it reminded me of how it was nice when he'd come up with these a-sides, and they'd get played on the radio and 'ting.

There's a non-signed version for $34. Wish there was just a PDF d/l for $10.

At it again--I'll definitely be listening:

http://www.beck.com/index.php/beck-reimagines-david-bowies-sound-and-vision

Paid for by a car company

That obviously negates the artistic effort of the 180+ musicians involved. . .

Jesus H. Christ, what a gigantic error of taste that was! To make a Big Band, Big Top, Cast-of-Millions version of a song about "drifting into my solitude over my head" shows that you may have the means, but you've completely lost the meaning.

Wearing a ten-gallon hat, Beck points at one corner of the tent and the musicians there respond! He points at another and lo, a heavenly host of evangelical singers replace Eno's synth line (a hundred times more effective on a synth)! It's like looking through a telescope the wrong way; megalomania never made everything look so small.

This PT Barnum buffoonery made the Glass Spider Tour - for which Bowie was rightly lambasted - seem like an Unplugged performance. Just a big yucky gaffe, enough in-and-of-itself to downgrade Beck from Classic to Dud status.

At least it sold some gas-guzzling Lincoln SUVs, though. I'm certainly buying one after watching.

I love 'Arabian Nights'...Alfonzo giving me a back rub...getting smacked up by unemployed hand models...hockey players passed out in government limos...

New song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTM3YPTYNo0

exciting to hear him over something that has a non-sleeping pulse again but i have no idea why this is five minutes long?

In the afternoon
Riding the scape goat
Burning equipment
Decomposing

Dud

Hate the fucker forever for his Scientology shenanigans, but totally classic obv. Odelay.