AM music versus REC music

Back in the Sixties & Seventies, when I heard a lot of music-making in Canadian REC rooms, one thing was abundantly clear to my bleeding ears, if not yet to my mind.

This was music made in a rec room, but not made for a rec room : bands practising at volumes more suitable for the thousand seater auditoriums they soon hoping to be performing in.

These bands might think they were amateurs but they were really instead that very common transitional group : amateurs-hoping-to-be-professionals, hoping soon to be performing before others, for others, for money.

The true amateur musicians, lovers of music-making for its own sake, don’t need an audience other than the other performers and singers in the same room with them.

They simply love to sing or play, without money, without audience.

The parlour musicians of 1820s-1920s fit that bill.

We still find true AM music today, on YouTube.

Not the supposedly amateur cover band with two hundred million views : but rather those with maybe only a few hundred or few thousand views.

Still they continue to put out new songs, simply because they enjoy doing so.

The point that best defines them is when they are asked to perform in public , maybe even do a small tour : if they decline, saying they must secure the day job they enjoy, or that they have too many family commitments, then we know we see the true amateurs.

For a variety of reasons, of which job and family loom far in the background, they don’t think they would really enjoy playing before audiences, hewing to the audience’s time table and requests.

They much prefer repeatedly trying out different takes on a weird pop version of a rap tune and only releasing it on YouTube, a year later, when they finally got bored with it.

They prefer dancing to their own drummer.

These groups may still be performing in a REC room but this time the music is made for the rec room, as well as just in it.

The volumes are much lower, the textures much more linear and transparent : because it is no longer fun to do if they all can’t hear each other’s musical line and respond to it.

Think of bebop jazz pianists, in a tiny club, dropping in the occasional muted 3rd and 7th of the chord, instead of stride jazz solo pianists in a big hall, incessantly pounding out block chords at top volume with all ten fingers, simply to be heard.

Some instruments in the truly amateur rec room are rare : brass winds and cymbals and most drums were never designed for indoor use in small rooms, in rec rooms they sound either monstrously loud or ridiculously quiet.

Real Marshall stacks are also out - though as I said in an earlier post albeit, merely echoing the advice of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page : inside a studio even a tiny amp can be made to sound very loud, even when it is not. That works for fuzz guitar and fuzz bass : but real loud deep bass from bass guitars and bass drums remain too loud for small rooms.

We are in a  moment of a truly historic transition in the global history of music : Covid-19 fears are merely hastening the long slow death of stadium filling rock groups and concert hall filling orchestras.

For advantages in electronics has moved far beyond the 1970s bringing in of loud music from extremely expensive but small solid state equipment to today’s bringing in of loud-sounding music from tiny, cheap software equipment.

Maybe 7000 people in the whole world can play the oboe at a professional level : one person in a million.

The instrument is very expensive, good players obviously scarce - and expensive.

To assemble twenty such players of various traditional instruments in my rec room would be impossible for so many reasons : they’d charge union rates and cartage, I would need an arranger and a copyist for charts, for yet more money. My rec room is far to small to fit all in.

Or I can go to my free (did I mention free ?!) copy of Garageband  on this ipad, where I have an orchestra full of individually sampled instrument notes, played in tune by the finest musicians, to assemble like a child’s lego set, into music compositions.

Perhaps via the fingers of me and four friends in my rec room, live, with tiny MIDI keyboards attached to Garageband equipped ipads, switching instantly between various software instruments as the tune requires.

Or perhaps, done all by my self, in bits and pieces over a long period of time, in the way that a writer writes a book or a composer creates a tune.

The point is we are likely to soon see an outpouring of actual amateur music making out of all this, not merely today’s mostly amateurs-hoping-to-be-professionals..