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Smells like an emotionally-charged price ...

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gweimer:
People place way too much value on pop culture.  I remember that the Precision bass owned by Sid Vicious (blood stains intact) was up on Ebay a few times with an asking price of $100K.  It never sold.
As far as Nirvana goes, I have always said that it was the production and mixing of Nevermind that made that band a hit.  Butch Vig was the producer, but it was Steve Farmer that deserves all the credit (my old high school friend works at the studio, and gave me the inside scoop) for what was released.  Writing pop songs with minor chord changes and poppy vocal lines is clever, but hardly legendary.

Highlander:
What sells sells Gary, nothing has a "value" unless you sell it - the "Mona-Lisa" is simultaneously worthless and priceless...

Re the mix - I wonder what the "White Album", or any of his other influences, would have been like without George Martin, the "real" 5th Beetle...?

Whatever, nevermind...  ;)

PhilT:

--- Quote from: uwe on June 29, 2009, 07:35:21 AM ---Another Nirvana fan among us, obviously!

May I confess something utterly uncool? When I first heard Nirvana in the early nineties my thought was: Whoever writes these songs has absolutely no grasp of harmonic structure of chords, he is just sliding chords around on the guitar. (I felt about Soundgarden much the same way, I still wince at radical key changes within a song.)

Ever since then I have attempted to come to terms with people writing songs where the verse would warrant other chords being used in the chorus than the ones actually employed and vice versa. Call me narrow-minded, but it was hard work for me. I still find a C major chorus following an A minor verse more pleasant to the ear than a B minor chorus following an A major verse, but that is just me.

A lot of Nirvana - with all due respect to Kurt C. and his unlucky aim - still sounds to me like a beginner sliding power chords around on a fretboard in savage (some might say: revolutionary) disregard of where he should actually go. That can sound interesting sometimes as it builds up tension and has its charm if used sparingly (like playing D major, F# minor, C major and A major rather than D minor, F major, C major and A minor, but with a lot of grunge it was overdone.

Uwe

--- End quote ---

I always thought that was just a consequence of self-taught guitarists writing songs. A pianist or a trained composer will bring variety and structure to a song by using chords that are hard to play on a guitar. No pop/rock guitarist is going to subject themselves to diminished 13th flattened ninths if they can possibly avoid it, so odd combinations of straight major and minor chords is the only way to avoid sounding like everybody else. The arch exponent of seeing how many chords you can get into one song was Pete Townsend, but in his case the results were extraordinary.

uwe:
That's an interesting observation! With guitarists, I often get the feeling that they either have a good grasp of scales, but no chordal basis (except for the obvious straight chords and power chords), i.e. are adventurous soloists, but not adventurous chord players, or you get these people who play the strangest chords, stretching their fingers across the fretboard, but frown at you if you say. "Hey, play a blues scale solo now!". You really can't trust them either way, useless bunch they are ...  :mrgreen:

angrymatt:

--- Quote from: uwe on July 16, 2009, 04:28:52 AM ---With guitarists, I often get the feeling that they either have a good grasp of scales, but no chordal basis (except for the obvious straight chords and power chords), i.e. are adventurous soloists, but not adventurous chord players, or you get these people who play the strangest chords, stretching their fingers across the fretboard, but frown at you if you say. "Hey, play a blues scale solo now!". You really can't trust them either way, useless bunch they are ...

--- End quote ---

HA!  I think I'm going to get that whole paragraph tattooed on my back.

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