Saturday, September 12, 2009

I Learned how to Love Music from Video Games and Automobiles.

Music is not my life. I am not a musician, have no plans to become a musician, and if I were to learn to play a musical instrument/sing better (something I have vaguely considered), it would not be to become "a musician" but rather something to amuse myself in the quiet hours, or potentially to serenade women, but given that if I were to learn anything it would be the piano, and given that it's rather hard to drag a piano down the street to someone's window without alerting them and the police to my presence, the prospect seems pretty unlikely, unless it was that they were living next door, or indeed in the same house that I lived in.

So: my task appears to be, find a girl I like, convince them to move in with me on purely platonic terms, buy a piano, learn to play aforementioned piano, and then finally serenade aforementioned girl with aforementioned piano, finding out that they're really more of a violin girl, decide I didn't really like her anyway, and finish this sentence.

However, while music is not my life, it is definitely a large part of my life. I listen to music pretty much when I'm not doing anything else that requires my ears (or when the thing that does requires my ears is particularly dull). This is partially because I seem to need to keep most of my sense busy to be most productive (at this present moment in addition to typing on the keepboard and looking at the screen, I am listening to the Beatles and eating ice cream with fudge. Smell is the least behaved of senses and so gets no special treatment from me), but mostly because I've always loved listening to music, and how, more than a lot of other mediums, it can take up your whole world while you're listening to it.

I'd like to say that ever since I was born I was surrounded by lots of music and that this has somehow ingrained music upon my way of being, but frankly that would be a load of nonsense. I have no idea what I was doing when I was born (apart from the obvious). No, my first memories of music came five or six years later. They were of loud music and fast cars.

Ok, that sounds much more exciting than it probably was. My parents weren't, like, rock stars or anything. My dad is a computer programmer (though a pretty rockin' computer programmer), but he had an extremely large influence on my musical tastes.

My dad originally hails from up north, so when we were younger we made frequent car trips up north to visit various relatives. And by car trip I mean nine hours in a car. You can make stops along the way, take in various sights, make frequent requests to go to the toilet, or occasionally just stop because all three of us were fighting in the back and Dad found this just a little bit distracting when trying to drive, but in the end, it's nine hours in a car.

I was blessed with the superpower of not getting carsick when reading, but we spent most of our time looking out the window and listening to a lot of music.

There were lots of albums Dad listened to but there were three albums that I think might have been his favourites, as we listened to them hundreds of times over the years and they are now burned forever into my soul. They were River of Dreams by Billy Joel; We Can't Dance by Genesis; and, most prominently, Cloud Nine by George Harrison (Possibly my single greatest musical hero, and this album also featured one of my other heroes, Jeff Lynne, though I was not to learn this for another decade or so). These albums (with the addition of Queen, which we heard a lot of whenever we went driving with Mum), would set in stone a lot of my criteria of what made great music.

So at the very start, I was already about 5 years behind the times when it came to music.

Over the years I've acquired new music to listen to by many different means, some from my brothers, a couple from girl's I had crushes on at the time (the music stayed, the crush didn't), and random self discoveries thanks mostly to the wonder that is the internet.

The single biggest influence and repository of new music for me though, has been, without a doubt, video games.

I make no apologies for this.

Specifically, the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises, have greatly increased my love and understanding of music. From these games, whenver I found a song I loved, I would always go and do some hunting, and if the rest of their music matched, I'd buy an album or two, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I'm not sure anyone actually says that anymore.

Anyway. Thanks to Rock Band and guitar hero, (and a couple of other games) I have found:


  • Aerosmith
  • Boston
  • Charlie Daniels Band
  • Dragonforce
  • Eric Johnson
  • The Explosion
  • Fallout Boy
  • Foreigner
  • Various Video Game Soundtracks (Myst, Blizzard games, et al.)
  • Jonathan Coulton
  • The Killers
  • My Chemical Romance
  • Ok Go
  • Toto
  • Autograph
  • Weezer
  • Yes
  • And The Beatles, though that's a longer story deserving of a post all of its very own.
Now some of the above I only own a couple of songs from them, but a lot I'm now a follower, and collect their albums as they come out, or am in the process of collecting their back catalogues. What you'll notice is that a lot of the above list is, um, how shall I put this? Vintage. My mother quite frequently tells her friends that I listen to music that was cool when she was my age.

The other thing that these games have done for me is given me a better ear for music. Thanks to playing only one part (and, well, hearing which part was missing when I missed a note) I now can actually hear the different instruments in a song much better than I could previously. I can now hear the lead guitar, as opposed to rhythm or bass, pick out the drums and split the harmony parts, whereas previously it was all one big wall of sound, wonderful to hear, but unable to be separated into component parts. Actually playing along in a small way has improved these skills greatly. Who says video games don't do anything for you?

Now some people may point out that this is probably a skill that would normally be picked up from going to live performances, and these people have a point. But given I don't really do concerts (large crowds and me don't exactly mix), this is certainly a happy compromise.

There's a lot more I could wax lyrical about, the bands that have had the biggest influence on me (The Beatles/George Harrison, They Might Be Giants, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Electric Light Orchestra) but these are probably topics worthier of their own post.

Also it's 2am. So no. Later. When it's daylight.

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