Chris Holmes Online

Two years ago I lamented the loss of powertabs.net. The MPA, stick fully inserted in ass, took action against the best and most popular guitar tab site on the internet. It was a disappointing move from an organization that clearly didn’t understand what they were dealing with. They saw copy write infringement where non existed.

Fortunately, a bit later, powertabs.net was freed from the bonds of stupidity, and allow to operate again. For the past year and a half I’ve been happily downloading tabs of songs (I’ll reveal more on this in a later post).

Well, a couple days ago I noticed comments coming through on my nearly two-year-old post; comments that seemed to indicate it was shut down again.

Turns out, it’s true. In another incredibly unfortunate move, the MPA has managed to shut down powertabs.net yet again.

This is, simply put, a travesty. It shows a completely lack of comprehension in what tabs are, who creates them, and why.

Web sites like powertabs.net exist for two basic reasons:

• Musicians, guitar players in particular, want to know how to play a song correctly.
• “Official” tab books are almost always horribly inaccurate.

In order to play a song correctly then, guitar players and other musicians – the very gifted ones – transcribe the songs themselves. And then, so the rest of us poor saps don’t suffer, they share those tabs.

I’ve tried tabbing songs myself. I’m very bad at it. I don’t have perfect pitch; I don’t hear the nuances very well. But I know when I hear inaccuracies. I know when the transcription is wrong. And a good portion of tab books are just awful.

If tab books were as accurate as the many transcriptions I’ve downloaded from powertabs.net, I’d happily buy them. I buy CD’s, I buy DVD’s, I download songs off iTunes. I have a very low tolerance for people who pirate software and music. I have no problem spending money to get accurate transcriptions. Most musicians I know have some amount of money, otherwise they couldn’t afford their instruments and equipment. This isn’t about money, no matter what the MPA claims.

This is about the big guy putting his thumb on the little guy. This is about the MPA exerting control – throwing their weight around.

What the MPA doesn’t understand is that musicians love music. They want to play music, perform music, and share music. They want to play their favorite music – they want to learn other people’s stuff so they can be exposed to new ideas – they want to expose other people to songs they’ve never heard. They want to push themselves to get better as musicians. They want to be inspired. Learning other people’s songs is how we accomplish this. Learning them accurately is where powertabs comes in.

I don’t often rail against corporations, artists or anyone else who tries to protect their intellectual property or their work. But this is a mistake. It’s a mistake because the MPA just doesn’t understand. All they’re doing with this move is making a lot of musicians – they very lifeblood of their industry – angry and hurt. They’re killing their biggest fans.

It’s disappointing.

I am not your average music listener. I’m a guitar player, and that skews my opinion on music quite a bit.

I like to think of my music listening history in terms of B.G. and A.G.

Before Guitar and After Guitar.

Before I learned to play the guitar, I just listened to whatever was on the radio. Whatever was popular is what I listened to, and I fell into lockstep with the rest of the world like all the other sheep.

After I learned to play the guitar I started seeking out more diverse music to challenge my own abilities. I was looking for music that was difficult play; music that contained elevated musicianship and technical excellence. Music that was not confined by the stringent requirements for radio-friendly circulation. This is when I discovered Dream Theater and progressive rock. Rush, Yes, Enchant and a host of other progressive bands soon followed, and I quickly fell away from mainstream music. I turned off my radio and turned on my CD player, and never really looked back.

Progressive rock was the music that grabbed my heart and mind at the same time. It challenged me as a listener and a musician. It is the most diverse, complex, rich and rewarding music for me to listen to.

But that doesn’t mean that a more mainstream tune can’t strike a chord deep within me and resonate. I still have a lot of favorite mainstream music in my library: Where The Streets Have No Name, by U2, for instance. But in order for a “pop” tune to grab me, it has to be exceptional; it has to have something special.

When you fall away from mainstream music like I did, it can be difficult to find new music that you like to listen to. Progressive rock, for instance, due to the complexity and the length of the songs (frequently 8-10+ minutes in length) doesn’t get a lot of radio play. So discovering new music can be challenging.

Enter Pandora.

Pandora is a unique kind of internet radio station. You select a song or artist, and Pandora starts playing music that has the same qualities as that song or artist. Each time a song plays you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down (or stay neutral and not do anything). A thumbs down causes Pandora to stop playing that song immediately, and try not to play others like it. A thumbs up and Pandora will try to find more songs and artists with those same qualities.

Because progressive rock is so diverse it contains many different qualities, from metal to rock, jazz to punk, classical to blues. So giving thumbs up to a few progressive rock tunes can give Pandora a lot of leeway to find matches (or so it seems). I’ve had some really interesting suggestions come across my radio station; some good, some bad. Quite often Pandora will suggest more “mainstream” (I hesitate to use the term “pop”) music songs to me. Most of the time I just pass, but then this song came across my radio station, and I stopped dead in my tracks:

Click here if YouTube gives you an error message.

The song is “Roses” by the band RPLW. I had never heard of them before. You probably haven’t either. But that doesn’t change the sheer jaw-dropping greatness of this tune.

This is simply the best pop/mainstream song I’ve heard in a decade. It is from their 2005 album, and it’s a shame that it didn’t get any pub/circulation. I can’t think of any song to land on the radio in the last decade that I’d rather here more than this song.

With a new season of American Idol underway, I had to post this. This is what pop music should aspire to be. If everything were this good I think I could turn my radio back on.

Last week I had a conversation with a guildmate of mine while playing Everquest 2. We were discussing American Idol, the talent show that has taken over America. Even Tony Kornheiser can’t go a single day on Pardon the Interruption without mentioning his love for all things Idol.

My guildmate made the argument that Idol was everything that was good and right about music in America today. He said that for all the people who have a problem with the music industry today, Idol was the answer. He said it was, “real people singing real songs.” My reply was that I thought exactly the opposite. Idol is everything wrong with music. It is the antithesis of great music. My guildmate asked me to elaborate on that, but time did not permit. And as I thought about why he made his comment and why I made mine, it became clear to me that, although we both love music in a general sense, we don’t hear the same things when a song is played. And I think I know why that is.

I think there is a huge disconnect between musicians and listeners.

I am a musician. Not the best one, for sure, but a musician nonetheless. I picked up my first instrument at age 19, much later in life than most musicians. Because I started so late as a musician I can remember clearly what it was like to think about music before knowing anything about it. To be a truely uninformed fan. Since I started playing guitar, however, my views on music have changed drastically. I understand a lot more about what is actually going on in a song when I hear it. I understand that a song is much more than lyrics and singing, and I’m far more interested in what the instruments are doing than what the singer is saying.

Real music, at least to me, is art. It is not commercialism. It is musicians bearing their souls to the world, not just through singing, but through all the things that make a piece of music great. It requires knowledge of music theory (at some level), excellence with instruments, and the ability to actually compose notes. When most people hear that someone “wrote” a song, they are likely thinking about the poetry – the lyrics. That is not the music, however. Lyrics are only one facet of a song, and a very thin one at that. Music is the stuff on the staff sheet. It’s the actual notes, the time signature, the key signature, melodies, harmonies, and everything that happens in between the first measure and the last. The real “music” of a song is much more difficult to create and reproduce than the words sung over the top. And you can bet that when a musician writes down a note, whether it’s a whole note at 90 bpm or a 16th note at 170 bmp, it is an important note. The artist puts that note in that song at that exact location for a reason. It belongs there. It was not mean to be chopped, edited or removed.

Idol is that antithesis of great music because it strips away everything that makes music an artform (and thus great), and reduces it down to the one commercial thing that every non-musician can understand: the lyrics. The producers of the show chop songs in half, cut out instrumental passages and destroy the very soul of the songs so that some “real people” can show off their singing ability. I understand why they do this; they have to cut time off already short pop tunes to make room for commercials and witty remarks from Simon (by far the best part of that show because he’s the only one there with the guts to tell the truth). But that still doesn’t change the end result. The songs are butchered in the process, and the real music – the art – is lost.

When I watch American Idol (which is rare, but since my wife watches it I can’t help but see it while walking through the living room) I feel very sad for the original artists who wrote those songs. I know many famous artists actually work with the singers on the show, but I bet every single one of them, in private, would tell you they hate having their songs chopped on national television. It’s a bastardization of their songs. It’s a cheap immitation of art. What people are hearing on Idol is a knockoff. A counterfit.

When I meet someone who loves Idol for the music (I can understand someone loving the show for the theater of it) I feel compelled to help them. I want to rush out and buy them albums from real musicians, and then lock them in a room for a week with nothing but food, water, and a CD player. They need a healthy dose of Dream Theater, Rush, Yes, Kansas, The Beetles, Led Zepplin, Liquid Tension Experiment, Steve Morse & the Dixie Dregs, Rick Wakeman, Motzart, Beethoven and Bach.

Then, after a week, they can come back out into the real world.

American Idol is many things, and some of those things are very positive. It’s a chance at stardom, at living a dream. It is hope to a lot of people. I personally think that’s the greatest appeal of the show; it represents the American Dream, that we can do anything if we’re talented enough and work hard enough.

But Idol is not what is best about music. It is a prime example of what is worst about the music industry. It is a commercial vehicle designed to exploit young, talented singers and their dream to become famous. It is a cash cow for Fox and Simon Cowel. It is the antithesis of great music. It is the anti-art.

This is a sad development. Yesterday I logged on to powertabs.net to see if anyone had managed to tab Dream Theater’s Raise the knife, only to find that I needed to login to the site, something I’ve never had to do before. I went through the process of establishing a username and password, browsed to the Dream Theater section and then discovered that all of the tabs on PowerTabs.net were no longer available.

What the heck?

It turns out that the Music Publisher’s Association has taken it’s legal battle to the web and are shutting down sites that provide musicians with song transcriptions.
Their complaint is that these web sites rob artists of a valuable revenue stream that comes from selling guitar tabs and song scores. Lauren Keiser, president of the MPA says (via the BBC news):

“The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income,” he said. “But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we’re taking a more proactive stance.”

There’s just one problem with all of this: the tabs available on Powertabs.net are not copies from legitimate books sold by publishers. They are, in fact, hand-constructed tabs that musicans have deciphered by ear. The folks at PowerTabs.net have always been very explicit in their instructions that files uploaded to PowerTabs.net be the work of the person submitting it, and not a copy of an existing tablature book.

Musicians all over the world have used their own skill, brains and ears to decipher the recordings of their favorite artists and songs since music was invented. The only difference now is that they can take these deciphered scores (that they have created by themselves) and transcribe them into a PowerTab files so that the program can play them back in realtime using MIDI technology. This is not a trivial process. The files are then uploaded to a website (like powertabs.net) to share with other players, for free. This is an invaluable resource for musicians who want to learn songs from their favorite artists, but lack the time or skill to decipher such songs themselves. And as far as revenue is concerned, most of the songs on PowerTabs.net don’t even exist in a legitimate tablature book in the first place!

The MPA’s claim on this issue is absurd and wrong. This is nothing like Xeroxing an existing tablature book. These musicians are doing this using their own resources, namely their ears, brains and skill. They are robbing no one.

What I don’t understand is, how can an entity like the MPA legally tell someone not to transcribe a song if they so choose? Where is the legal precidence that says a person cannot decipher another person’s musical work? And once the song is transcribed, why can’t that person share it with a friend? If they are making no money from it, then there’s no legal infraction here. And that is precisely what guitar players are doing. They are sharing their own creations with each other. Instead of doing it one-on-one, they use the web.

I hope when this goes to court that the MPA gets exactly what they deserve: a good ass-reaming from the judge for being a bunch of jerkoffs. They should be ashamed of themselves. If they want to attack people who are copying published work then I’m all for that. I hate piracy. But I’ve been using the PowerTab archive for a couple years now and I know how it works. These are not copies of published work. These are musician’s interpretations. There are songs on PowerTabs.net that I’ve never seen in any tablature book anywhere; I’d gladly buy them if they existed. But they don’t, so I use Powertabs. Many times the transcriptions on PowerTabs.net are imperfect. That should be clue #1 that artists are not having their official tab books “Xeroxed”.

Fortunately, if you’re like me and you’re still looking for PowerTabs you can find mirrored archives:

pta.acidpit.org
powertabs.phiross.org
www.allpowertabs.com (courtesy of Jack Holmns)

P.S. Bonus points if you name the artist and song of the transcription at the top of this post.

Sometimes genius isn’t appreciated until long past its time. Such was the the plight for legendary film director Orson Wells. His movies were often met with lukewarm critical praise and commercial failure. Yet today, the man responsible for Citizen Kane, often regarded as one of the best, if not the best, film of all time, is regarded as a genius. Entertainment Weekly ran a nice piece this week on Wells concerning his film Arkadin. Hollywood didn’t truly appreciate Wells until he was gone, and apparently Wells knew that would be his fate. EW quotes him as saying, “God, how they’ll love me when I’m dead….”

And Wells was right.

The same fate probably awaits Dream Theater, the group responsible for Octavarium.

I’ve long thought that the members of Dream Theater are the modern day equivalent of Bach, Motzart and Beethoven. They are the most theoritically knowledgeable and technically sound musicians of the modern day. Heck, they’re probably better than anyone has been for 100 years. And the music they create is unlike anything you’ve probably ever heard. It is the most complex, sophisiticated, intelligent and technicially proficient stuff to come along – ever. On top of all of that, they write great songs too.

Dream Theater released Octavarium last year (2005). When I first listened to it I thought it was good; certain songs and passages immediately vaulted to the top of my favorite list. But I didn’t see the genius behind it. I didn’t think it was anything more than another solid effort from a group of musicians who had long ago surpassed the writing and performing skills of every other modern musical act on the planet. After all, these are the guys that make the Dave Matthews Band look like 12-year-olds practicing for the state fair in their garage.

But then I ran across this website. It is nothing short of a fully detailed analysis of all the hidden nuggets, Easter Eggs if you will, embedded in the album Octavarium. And boy, are there a lot of Easter Eggs…

If you’re familiar with the Circle of Fifths then you will enjoy the theme underneath Octavarium. For those of you who don’t know a lot about music theory, let me give you a quick explanation:

An octave on the piano consists of five black keys and eight white keys. An octave begins and ends on the same note, completing a circle. It is that circle, that concept of ending where we begin, that is the basis for the album Octavarium. The numbers 5 and 8 reoccur all over the album; they are embedded everywhere.

But the Circle of Fifths isn’t the only hidden theme of the album. There are references to the Alcoholic’s Anonymous 12-step program (a theme that was started in an earlier album and is continued here) as well as references to other musical acts that have inspired/influence Dream Theater. The opening to the song Octavarium sounds eerily like the beginning of Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, one of many intentional immitations/references. There comes a point later in the song where James LeBrea (lead singer) does an impression of Megadeath’s Dave Mustain that is so perfect in its tone and inflection that one wonders why Mustain’s band never sounded this good. Even the lyrics to the song have embedded references:

sailing on the seven seize the day tripper diem’s ready
jack the ripper owens wilson phillips and my supper’s ready
lucy in the sky with diamond dave’s not here I come to save the
day for nightmare cinema show me the way to get back home
again

Can you count the number of references in that section? Don’t cheat. Think singing that might be a problem? Listen to the track and you’ll be blown away at what Dream Theater achieves with this song.

And they aren’t done yet. A heartbeat at the end of the song These Walls beats at 58 bpm. The starting piano note to the first song of the album is F, the same note that ended the previous Dream Theater album. Not to leave the circle open, the final song on the album also begins and ends in F.

I’ve touched about 2% of the Easter Eggs.

You really have to check out the dissection to appreciate everything Dream Theater achieved with this work. Once you see it all layed out in staggeringly accurate detail it becomes clear that Octavarium is a work of sheer musical genius.

Now listen to the album. To hear the actual music is mind-blowing. How anyone could create this work is beyond me. Yet they did it. Motzart would weep with joy if he could hear this.

Seeing the dissection of Octavarium reminded me of the ending of The Sixth Sense. I thought it was a good movie, I liked Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, but I didn’t see the genius of the movie right away while I was watching it. That is, until the final moments of the film when The Twist is revealed. It was in that moment when the true genius of the film comes into focus. I saw it for the brilliant work it really was. If that ending wasn’t there it would simply have been another decent movie, but greatness would have eluded it.

Listening to Octavarium without being aware of the nuggets is like watching the first 90 minutes of The Sixth Sense. It’s good, but you can’t appreciate the greatness of it without knowing all the details. Only after you know The Rest Of The Story does the genius of the work come into focus.

Octavarium probably won’t be appreciated by the mainstream music culture while the members of Dream Theater are alive. Only prog-geeks like myself will have much respect and admiration for it. But this is an album, and more specifically a song, that music historians will point to, debate and dissect for decades, if not centuries. There is no doubt in my mind that Octavarium is a landmark in the history of music. It’s like the Beatles White Album, or Beethoven’s Fifth. It’s just that special.

Enjoy the Easter Egg hunt.