#it's easily my FAV rihanna song but anyone would look so fucking dumb playing that on a violin

[firelord-frowny]

!!!!!!!!!!!

someone booked me to play violin stuff at a marriage proposal event and liiiiiiiiiiike.

im CLEARLY not a People Person lmaooo so ordinarily i say Hell To The Naw Naw Naw for these kinds of gigs. but i’m also Poor these days so i agreed to do it and then i was all 😭 to discover that the songs they wanted were all r&b songs???? and like. 

legit, r&b is probably my absolute Least Favorite genre of music as a whole. cue every black person within a 100 mile radius gasping and insisting that i’m Not Really Black or something dumb like that lmao and obbbbvvviouslyyyyy there are a handful of r&b songs that i’m kinda into, but for the most part, the genre totally misses all of the most critical marks that usually inspire me to enjoy a song. (but also like, just to placate those annoying ~how do you hate r&b if you’re black~ people, i’ll mention that i AM partial to other Black Genres in the rap and/or hip hop range, particularly like... pre-early 2000s stuff.)

so i was like aw SHIT now i have to listen to these rhythm and blues songs long enough to actually learn them. :( which i mean, i’m hella expert at learning shit exclusively by ear, and popular music is almost BY DEFINITION easy as fuck on classical instruments, so it wasn’t difficult at all. Just... not enjoyable lmao. 

BUT!!!! i DID learn something interesting! 

I’ve never really though too hard about why it is that i tend to dislike r&b. But in the process of learning the songs i had to learn, i noticed that the rhythms were so imprecise. Which i mean, it’s like that On Purpose. There’s a LOT of eb and flow. a LOT of really drastic liberties taken as far as entrances, and how long certain notes are held for. there’s obviously a LOT of ~runs~ as we call them, where the singer just kinda... sings a whole bunch of notes in rapid succession, usually more-or-less improvising around a certain chord or scale with a VERY carefree rhythm. 

And??? despite all the theatrics of the runs and the improv-like rhythm, the melodies are usually SUPER simple. I mean, most mainstream music has simple melodies, but it really stands out to me in a lot of r&b music because so many of the verses are literally just... the same three notes over and over again in various configurations. This works out fine in vocal music where the lyrics are a major part of the musical experience. But when you transcrive these songs into instrumental versions, it’s SO dull. Maybe not to an untrained ear, but a classical player is going to be SUPER BORED with playing/hearing G G G G G A  A, A D D A D A D* 8 times in a row in the same octave and at the same tempo. 

And don’t get me wrong - i enjoy a lot of songs with simple melodies that only feature a few notes! But for me, those songs have to have lyrical content that is interesting to me, and/or instrumental content that is engaging to my ear. So, r&b fails in this capacity for me because almost ALL of the mainstream songs in the genre are about love or sex or romance in some capacity, and i hate that shit lmao. And, I’m usually not enamored with the instrumentation, most of which is synthesized, and the live instruments that usually do get featured... aren’t instruments that I usually enjoy lmao like piano. or plain ol electric lead guitar without any distortion, usually just lil single-note, melodic solos, and i HELLAAAAA prefer rhythm guitar over lead most of the time. I mean, please fuck me UP with a killer solo a la Hendrix or Morello or Malakian. But I wanna headbang to some power chords, too! 

So like, comparatively, Nirvana is a band whose music isn’t complex. Usually just the same three-ish chords over and over again. and cobain honestly was not a stellar singer lmao. but i like the actual sound quality - the timbres, the instrumentation, etc. and i like the lyrics for the most part, too. 

system of a down, on the other hand???? their music is some of the most complicated and technically demanding non-classical music i’ve ever heard lmfao god it’s INCREDIBLE. key changes, a variety of time signatures, unconventional scale modes, use of middle eastern and/or south asian harmonies and instruments... it’s fucking fabulous. And MANY of their melodies are complex enough that they’d still sound engaging in an instrumental version. A lot of manistream music sticks to just a couple chords per verse, but a lot of SOAD songs feature more frequent chordal changes. and then there’s obviously the fact that both tankian and malakian are fantastic singers. OH and their lyrical content/subject matter is sophisticated as FUCK. 

Vienna Teng! She’s a genius! Oh my god! Melodies that make use of the entire range of a key rather than just sticking to two or three notes. instrumentation that features actual, non-synthesized instruments, and those instruments vary depending on the subject of the song. piano, strings, background vocals that function solely as instruments in their own right... 

and back to my original point, 

Most of the songs in these genres by these artists stick to a consistent rhythm. they don’t take very many liberties. You could easily transcribe any SOAD song because the rhythmic subdivisions are precise. But in order to properly notate the rhythm of many r&b songs, you’d need to subdivide right down to 132nd notes instead of the usual 16ths or MAYBE 64ths. and i ain’t about that life. 

SO, 

adhering to a precise rhythm is something that’s almost ubiquitous in classical music. i mean yeah, we do take liberties from time to time, and many pieces call for increases or decreaases in tempo, but for the most part, imprecise rhythm is a whole ass cardinal sin lmaooo. unless it’s some of that freaky New Music.

And since I’m soooooo accustomed to rigid rhythmic standards, i think the ebby-flowines of r&b makes my ear super uncomfortable! It’s unpredictable for me, which makes me anxious because it’s difficult to know when the next note or the next lyric is going to be sung. so it’s hard for me to get a feel for it.

so like, 

the point of this post is just to say how neat it is that i could learn something so interesting about my musical tastes from playing music i don’t like lmaooo.